At work we drink a lot of Rockstar energy drink. With my acquisition of an FAL card (allowing us to buy wholesale food) we’ll be drinking a whole lot more, as well as eating Killer Pythons by the truck load.

Today I got to design and develop a system for managing escort agencies, escorts and the services they offer. On top of this I got to share the experience with one of my closest mates.

It was a really energizing session and I got to try out a bunch of new, trendy things. We did some pair programming and took the time to really think through the problem and design a system that really solved the problems elegantly. I got to show Tony some of the cool things I like about Ruby on Rails and I picked up a bit about NetBeans along the way.

It was some of the best fun I’ve had at work in a while, and I’m definitely going to use it as a basis for future in-house development sessions.We’ve got a message-queueing system that I’m going build with Hale later this month that I think will benefit from a similar approach.

On the flip side, I’m also fixing up some really, really bad code (that we’ve inherited) for a new customer in another project. Even though I’m migrating the “business logic” to a Rails back-end, it uses a vulgar table-based layout and I’m not enjoying working on this project at all. It’s the result of off-shore development, where the primary goal was “make it look like it works.” The deadlines are slipping and it’s hard to stay motivated.

Working on these two projects in one day highlighted some things to me that I’m going to really take on board and use to enhance my life, and hopefully others too, at The Frontier Group.

There’s a really distinct link for me between enjoyment and elegance. Ruby allows me to design elegant code; to implement an elegant solution. Ruby makes me happy. It lets me express myself without 37 pieces of flair. It’s funny to think about a programming language in that way, especially if you’re a non-programmer.

Even though I’m shifting PHP out of our enterprise and putting more focus on Ruby and Rails, spaghetti code is spaghetti code and it doesn’t matter what language it’s written in - it matters how much you paid the Filipino “programmers” to write it.

One of 2009’s goals for me is to increase the elegance (and hence enjoyment and pride) of my work.

On a side note, I think it’s about time I started to wear a suit to work.