Zombie Programmer

Man am I tired.

In the midst of my effort to not overcommit myself, I agreed to help some friends with a dance studio opening here in Irvine. Given my current work situation(s), I'm not sure what I was thinking. It seemed like a good thing to do at the time.

Wednesday night I worked until 2am, finishing site layout and packaging it into a simple little PHP content management system. Man PHP is simple. I think PERL was a little jealous.

Thursday after work our friends came over w/ all their ideas, content, schedules, images to scan, etc. The timing was key for her, the website needed to go live 8/1. She had prepared to resign from her current studio today as well. Also, auditions would occur 8/15, which was coincidentally her final day with her old studio.

We worked through the night plugging content in, formatting, and writing more content... We'd long since reached that punchy stage of over-tiredness when 6:20am rolled around and with a final flourish of FTP commands the site was live. We joked that it was just in time for the "east coasters" coming in and hitting up the website. We thought we were hilarious.

Of course promptly after launching the site, it was my normal wake-time to get ready for work. I did make it in to the office in time for the Friday morning breakfast run..., April walked into my office as I started to doze off -- sitting in front of my PC, hand on the mouse. Gah... pretty embarrassing.

Despite the coffee, same thing happened a couple of more times on Friday, almost falling asleep at the wheel, er mouse. If anyone walked into my office while I was dozing, they were polite enough to quickly back out.

Resigned

Trying to get out from underneath this pile of commitments. Finally made some headway today.

Yesterday I sent an email to the CMO at Medsphere letting him know my intention was to resign my position. This afternoon we had an opportunity to chat about things... The conversation went fairly well. He was understanding of my situation and agreed that it would probably be best if we parted ways.

I was upfront about completing one last project that's almost there... I don't want to leave them hanging or hurt them in anyway. I still believe in the concept and vision -- I know they'll do very well. He agreed there was no hard feelings in either direction. I really like these guys.

I know I'll miss working with the team -- I had some good times with them over the last year.

MSC: Week 1

Today marks one week at Medsphere. It's 6:20pm. Steve and I are heading to Indianapolis to do a technology review with a company that we want to partner with... Yeah, if I had to travel all the time, this could get annoying, but if the trip is useful and productive I'm all for it.

It's been an interesting week. There's a lot of work to be done here. At the moment, much of it is tactical -- related to ongoing and upcoming deployments. Although I'm helping manage the development effort, our team must also work on the custom enhancements and interfaces required for each deployment. This is going to be a distracting aspect of the job. Making sure we keep our heads up, looking towards the long-term goals while trying to keep up with today's customers needs.

Yep, MSC is hiring

Todd's right. We are now looking for people to fill a couple different positions at Medsphere. If you're interested or know of someone with the skills we are looking for, send me an email at work: ben.mehling[AT]medsphere.com.

Work, work, work.

My second tour of duty at MSC continues to provide plenty of work. It's a good thing, really. I still feel like the team here can make things happen. Good things for the company and great things for our customers.

When I told friends and family that I was leaving my (safe and comfortable) job for a (risky and challenging) job at a startup, you could detect a momentary lapse -- an instant between them hearing the news and putting on their congratulatory smile -- where you could see the question in their eyes; What the hell are you thinking?

Beyond the personal need to move on from a job that was stagnant and conflicting with my own goals, I believe in what Medsphere is attempting to do. While we may not yet be firing on all cylinders, I believe we are doing good and important work.

Now, for the folks that have no idea what it is we do: We develop and enhance an existing, highly acclaimed, Hospital Information System called VistA. This system was developed over the last 25+ years at the US Department of Veteran Affairs. It powers the largest healthcare network in the US. We also assist smaller hospitals with deployments and training of this sytem -- hospitals that could not easily afford the commercially offered HIS systems. There have been a lot of articles praising this system and the VA itself, here are a couple recent stories that help explain what this system can do for healthcare providers and why I feel strongly about what we are trying to do:

• The Best Care Anywhere (Washington Monthly, Jan/Feb 2005)


• Miltary Might (US News and World Report, July 2005

Opening Healthcare

Well, after 10 days of preparation and too little sleep, this week marked an important milestone for the engineering team at Medsphere. After nearly two years of effort on multiple fronts, Medsphere has open sourced two important packages (with more to come). We pushed hard to prepare these packages and a supporting website in time for a release during the big healthcare information systems conference in New Orleans.

The release was fairly well received, but inevitably there will be folks who are dissatisfied with some aspect of our release methodology, license choice, philosophy or what have you. No matter. Both the teams involved (OpenVista Server and OpenVista CIS) should be extremely proud of their accomplishments. Not only should the Medsphere teams be satisfied, but also the GTK and Mono teams should get a kick out of a full scale EMR/EHR application fronted by a cross-platform, internationalized, .NET application made possible by their projects.

Early Sunday morning (too damn early), I traveled to New Orleans to assist w/ booth duties and be available to talk technology with prospects. Due to weather patterns only a couple of us made it on Sunday, but we got the booth ready for action on Monday. Prospects tended to like the idea of the open nature of our software, and existing customers gave favorable accounts of our services. Despite very little sleep over the past 10 days, all the work, thankfully, came together in the end.

I would be remiss if I didn't also thank my own family, especially Hol, for accepting my absences and bleary-eyed attendance with a knowing smile.

15th WorldVistA Conference

Returned last night from the 15th WorldVistA conference, held in Seattle this year. About 50+ interested parties came to three days of workshops, presentations and panel discussions. I haven't attended since 2002 when Medsphere hosted. It was nice to see a number of old comrades and also meet some new folks. I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to present the OpenVista Appliance with a couple of experts on the subject. This also gave me a chance to briefly show off CIS. While at the conference we also took the opportunity to update our GTK installers, CIS and Appliance releases.

Many thanks to the hard working volunteers at WorldVistA for their hours and hours of dedication and hard work.

Since summer has already begun for Hol, she traveled with me and got to spend some time in downtown Seattle. Her dad even came over for the day. We stayed off of Queen Anne St., at the very funky MarQueen hotel (built in 1918 to house the blacksmiths for the engineering school!) -- if you're in this area the restaurant (Peso's Kitchen and Lounge) just across the street had good atmosphere and food (and art)! This is only my second time to Seattle, but it's a very cool town -- extremely mellow and architecturally interesting.