Why wasn't my lunch bigger?
It's my turn for Ask Me Anything.
I'm one of currently four developers working the tech side at Daily Kos. (As it happens, we have an opening for another Ruby on Rails developer, for any of you so inclined.)
I was the project manager for DK 4 and did a great deal of the coding for it; currently I have the rather amorphous title of "Systems Specialist." Whatever that means, what I do here is a combination of looking after the database and optimizing data queries, pulling out usage statistics, building out administration & management tools, assorted other coding and feature development, testing everything everyone else builds, and covering the help desk. The helpdesk task feeds directly back to the administration tools; I'm doing my best to write more systems to make that a smaller job. The testing feeds helpdesk ... as the person who answers questions, I'm the person most motivated to ensure that we don't release bugs and that any error messages make sense, and to try to develop FAQs that can answer questions without me. But most of my days are spent writing and developing code.
We are hard at work porting the site into its next incarnation. DK4 was built in ModPerl, with what some people call the LAMP stack. All the new features are being built in Ruby on Rails. Currently, what you know as Daily Kos is running from a combination of both kinds of servers. As we work our way through every feature, eventually the site will be solely Ruby on Rails.
The next release includes a rewrite of the user sign up pages. I am hoping it will cut helpdesk technical inquiries by about a third.
My bio, like all the other staff bios, is on the masthead.
So, ask away.