No Pay, No Work; Early Career Lessons

Summary

Little elephant company — 7 people working out of a random house — 2013 I know we haven’t paid you for 30 days, but would you be willing to float another month? No, sorry, I’m out. Ok, sad to see you are not loyal to the company. No pay, no work It was the end of 2013; I’d gone two paychecks without pay. The client still hadn’t paid, I wasn’t about to start working for free. I resigned. I told my boss at the time: “no pay, no work”. Walking away wasn’t easy. They gave me my first shot as a professional coder. I was genuinely sad to leave the office, going with my coworkers to the nearby Subway restaurant, and especially the cat that roamed our office/house workspace. Before the payment drama, this had been an objectively awesome job for a 17 year-old. This was a company that did AR, and other super cool projects for the time. When I started, this company focused in a project for one of Mexico’s efforts for renewable energy. A page for companies to apply for their energy savings grants for commercial builders. If companies met the requisites, they would be awarded money which had to be closely tracked with reciepts/invoices and other kinds of controls. This meant we had to do a lot of stuff: Complex business rules that changed frequently Multi-stage application processes with interdependent fields Calculation-heavy rebate formulas Document verification workflows Domain-Specific Languages and Form Wizardry Due to the complicated nature of these web controls, my manager developed a domain-specific language (DSL) for PHP. We’d encode business rules into this DSL, and the framework would automatically generate the appropriate web form fields. It was quite impressive to see a real-world example of meta-programming that I’d only read about in forums. I’d then modify the forms with JavaScript to make it nicer to fill (add calendars, autohide if there are dependencies/constraints etc. some jQuery magic). I got hired to implement the magic toggles with jQuery/JavaScript, but ...