A while ago, a work colleague (JPh) who knows a lot about education technology, physics, and grant proposals, wrote a grant proposal for us to develop some software. After a lot of messing about we came up with an idea for a software project that would involve me writing code for three days a week for the next eight months (ie cutting down my current job to 2 days a week). The aim was to produce some GPL code for use within the education sector. Lots of people were applying for the same grant and so it was very unlikely we’d win it.
Only we did! This is due to JPh’s ability to, in the words of our director, “write a dandy grant proposal”.
This is great news, but a tad scary: I never imagined we would! I’m very excited because it’s going to be something I can concentrate on without being interrupted with stupid stuff about passwords, user quotas, forgetful support staff, moronic requests and badly specified (if specified at all) web projects. It’s scary because…well it just is…
Another work colleague, “Sue”, who is extremely intelligent and generally lovely, came to chat to me about jobs etc this week. She is wasted in her current position but doesn’t believe it. We talked about all kinds of stuff but by the end she had decided to teach herself about PHP/SQL. I’ve never met anyone who is more capable of learning complex stuff in such a short period of time than Sue. After our chat she:
- Installed PHP and MySQL on her TiBook
- Configured both of them
- Learned how to write PHP
- Learned about MySQL and SQL
- Exported her movie database from FileMaker Pro (yuck)
- Imported it into MySQL
- Worked out how to design an HTML search form and implemented the search in PHP
…in less than 48 hours…She should be running the department, not just working in it.
