I did an incredible amount of work this weekend.  Between Saturday and Sunday, I clocked in well over twenty hours, and it was all crazy productive and useful time.  I can’t talk too much about the project I’m doing, though it’s for the college and is the most complex and largest scale MySQL / PHP system I’ve created yet.

O’Reilly’s High Performance MySQL has been an unbelievably helpful resource, given me tons of ideas in terms of schema, indexing, and general strategies.  It’s a long book, though even the first few chapters are very helpful, and it’s very well written.

As a short cool-down, I played a few rounds of Team Fortress 2.  It’s a great game, and it looks quite stunning since I upgraded to an ATI HD5670.  My stats aren’t all that wonderful, and I mostly play with a wired 360 controller over keyboard and mouse.. but it’s fun and has a great cartoon-y aesthetic.  I also played a bit of GRID a few nights ago, which I’ve been enjoying a lot.  It’s much on the arcade side of simulators, though the instant flashback feature is great and the sound design and graphics work really well.

I heard it was beautiful outside the past few days, though I didn’t exit the door even to go into the hallway of my building.  I certainly have been more of a typical nerd recently; not exercising as much, skirting away from the sun.. though these work projects have been really interesting, and the idea that I’m creating something for a larger base of users is exciting.

I’m also coming into my sixth year of PHP development, and my code is getting tighter by the month.  It really is so much easier to write a lot of lines of code, yet condensing the logic and finding more efficient paths to the same solution is always worth the experience.  In my head, I think of it as the difference between writing scripts: small procedures to do a particular task; compared with programming: creating some kind of robotic life form which is beautiful and can speak for itself.