Joseph Brower

I used to work from home, but as of last Friday, that is no more. The company I work for (Nexus) has gotten my division a storefront. The end goal is to help give us a more public facing front. Overall, I have really enjoyed the move. I wasn’t aware of how much I missed socializing with my coworkers. Also, by having a very public location, we should be able to get a bit more business.

I encourage anyone who happens to be in the area to drop by and say hello. We would love to hear what you think of the location and what we have done with it.

Not only are we planning on using it as a storefront, it will also be acting as an office for myself, Scott, and Shaun, our artist. It will also be a conference room for meeting with clients and such. The Rexburg Opensource User Group will also be meeting there.

Well, that’s all for now. Until next time…

One of the greatest reasons I have for using open source software is technical education, but today’s posting is about the nontechnical education that I have recieved both directly and indirectly from my interaction with open source.

Open source has taught me how to work with people, as both a leader and a follower. I have always tried to give back to open source, and before I knew how to code, the only thing I could do was test and provide bug reports. During that time, I had to learn how to properly reproduce problems, document how to do so, then report it to the proper group of people. It’s an experience that has helped me in my current work environment, and has helped me with training my team. Also, it has helped me to work with my team when reporting issues with sites and applications that we are developing.

Open source has taught me patience. I haven’t met any open source developer that didn’t want to enhance a project they worked on, however, I have met many open source coders that are short on time. You can’t ask them to work on your features, and you certainly can’t ask that they work on your features immediately. It has to be asked while thinking of the greater good and that sometimes means putting yourself on the back burner.

Open source has taught me that it really is better to share than to horde. We all learned early in our education that we should be sharing. Why then, do we try to horde everything as we grow older? Through my experience I’ve learned that sharing helps build trust, encourage transparency, and makes competition healthy by making companies improve services and customer experience.

Even if you aren’t a developer, I strongly encourage you to get involved in the world of open source. By doing so, you will make a difference and learn valuable skills.

As many of you know, I am the project lead for an open source piece of software called PHP Timeclock. We are nearing our big launch and we are all pretty excited… The following is a short list of changes…

Vastly improved interface.
Inline editing in reports.
Fine grained ACL
API for third party applications
Speed Enhancements (most reports take less than 1 second.)
Punch tagging (this is a really slick feature I will blog about later)
Automated overtime calculation
Better timezone management
Begginings of localization abilities
Group summary reports
Solid import/export abilities
and much more….

As you can see, we have been busy. We have also revamped the website. We are also making a virtual appliance and will be entering it in the Dister content. We encourage everyone to check it out. It should make life easier for those that have virtual environments in place.

If you feel like we should work towards some other features, please let us know at http://tickets.thenexussolution.com .

So I am planning on getting into the blog scene again. I will be trying to focus on some things I have been learning recently so that other can learn with me. If anyone has requests for topics, leave a comment.

I’ve been tinkering around with social networking a bit, specifically with Facebook.  It’s nice, nothing amazing, but it is nice to contact some old friends, and to meet new people.  My biggest complaint is that it doesn’t seem to have a focus or a direction, which isn’t a bad thing, but it isn’t really a good thing either.  I guess it just makes Facebook unique.  I’ve set up Ubuntu 10.04 to integrate with it, along with Twitter, and it works well.  If it wasn’t for that, I probably wouldn’t use it.  Right now I see it as more of a toy.  The privacy policy doesn’t permit me to use it for much, and most of the notifications I get are about games my friends are playing.  I’ll try it out for a bit longer.  I may end up with a few crazy ideas myself to try to build something similar but with more focus.  We’ll just have to see what happens.

Social networking is really a marvel in and of itself.  It lets you reach a large audience very quickly and, when used responsibly, can promote good ideas and encourage collaboration.  Just like any tool though, I’m noticing more and more that it really can mess up your life.  I keep finding stories of people doing stupid things and then updating their Facebook page to reflect that.  That just doesn’t seem wise.  Oh well, I guess as long as I’m not horribly stupid and not anxious to let the world know, I should be ok.