Sorry for the lack of posts recently, folks. Our little company has been having some major upheavals over the past week and a half (the details of which I will unfortunately never be able to put in writing; kind of a shame, too … would’ve made for a really fascinating bio) and I’ve been totally swamped trying to balance all the meetings with the rather voluminous workload. The good news is that the team is still (mostly) intact and we are going back to work stronger than before. The bad news is that I may have to redo all our business cards again. Argh.

More news as it happens, including hopefully a peek at the new social network we’ve been cooking up.

Back soon :)

It’s a weird feeling, having to head into an office to work everyday.

I guess you could say I’m a bit of a late bloomer, at least in terms of things like inter-office politics and procedures and things like that. I’ve still got a ton of things to learn and understand, and I’m sure I’ll never learn all of it.

By far the most surprising thing though has been how little work actually gets done. Over the past two weeks I’ve watched people from our company and from our client’s company clock in at 8 in the morning and clock out at 6pm (in our case, more like 8 or 9), and still barely accomplish anything.

Instead of actually doing stuff, an inordinate amount of time is instead devoted to meetings, meetings and more meetings. A couple of days ago for example, I got drawn into no less than 5 separate meetings in the same afternoon, none of which actually helped me get any work done. It took several days of these mind-numbing circle-jerk sessions before I finally realized that I was, in fact, supposed to say "no." I mean, all things considered, nothing is said in any of these get-togethers that is actually "solid"; you need stuff written down and signed off on before you can even think about implementation.

The other thing I’ve noticed is how few overlaps there are between people’s skillsets. For example, our client’s web department has a creative director that doesn’t touch HTML at all, and instead just passes flat JPEGs off to the development guys for slicing and implementation. And the content team actually differentiates between a content manager position, and a content editor position. 

I can totally see why it would be beneficial to have all of these positions in neat little boxes — in a way, they’re all cogs in a clock — but it implies that these people would be totally lost if one of the other cogs suddenly came loose. It’s great for a perfect-world kind of scenario, but for anything less than that, it just creates too many dependencies, and too many potential deal-breakers.

So after 5 years of freelancing and working out of my house, I have finally moved into a real office, care of Pandora Squared. It isn’t much to be excited about, all things considered, but it is my very first office ever, so there. We’re at a fairly high-rent building in The Fort, and from my 8th floor window I can see all the way across to Market! Market! and Serendra. Not bad for a first-timer, if I do say so myself. We’ll probably be moving out of this place within the next 5 months though, as we’ll be growing too large for this 40sqm space pretty soon.

Work on our next major project has been slowly unwinding; I’m not sure exactly how much of it I can write about without breaking our pinky-swear NDAs so I’ll just say that we’re putting together a very big Filipino social network focusing on one of my favorite things (no, not poker). I should be able to write more about it within the next week or so, as rollout schedules have been heavily compressed on this one; we are going to be pushing out a public beta before the end of this month and launching first week of October.

**We’re trying to grow our development team as we go along, so if anyone out there has web development experience and wants to learn Ruby on Rails, please feel free to contact me.**

My total online poker winnings has just topped $80, owing to the fact that I’ve won 4 out of the past 5 games I’ve played in (three 1st place finishes, and one 3rd place). I’m hoping this isn’t just some weird lucky streak, as I am starting to seriously consider devoting more regular time to this. I’ve started to get a very good feel for strategy (it helps that most of the people playing these low-end tables are sheep) so if your lifestyle isn’t too extravagant, you could, in theory, survive by playing poker 8 hours a day … especially in this country.

Each game takes about 30-45 minutes to play fully, so it’s highly possible for a seasoned player to play 30 games a day … probably way more than that if they can handle multiple simultaneous games. If you apply the win-ratio from my last 10 games (I’ve won cash in 7 out of 10), a dedicated person could take in about US$300 a day. A lot of poker pros began their careers by playing online so much that it became an all-consuming occupation, including my all-time favorite player Iain "Tillerman" Girdwood, of Starcraft fame.

Obviously I don’t have that kind of time available, but if I played 2-3 games daily on weekdays and 5-6 games on weekends, it’s totally possible to be generating about US$180 a week. Of course, the cost to enter those 20-25 games would be nearly US$75, so you’re really only looking at $100 profit. Even so, that is well over the national average wage, and not bad for what is essentially a recreational hobby. I’m never seriously going to give up the whole web dev career thing, but it’s nice to know there are other ways to extract money from this world.