That is the best explanation I could come up with when telling my team how I felt when coding, once again, after four years of not doing so.
Honestly, I don’t remember when was the first time I coded, nor the computer I used. It could have been the computer at school or my mom’s computer at her office. We didn’t have a computer at home until I was 14 years old. I am almost 100% positive that I coded for the first time using QBasic. During the years I learned several programming languages. I invested most of my time in C++ and Perl. Around five years ago I was investing most of my time coding part of Voice123 in Perl. Andrés Herrera & Milton Avila were also part of the original coding team of Voice123. Little by little I started to invest my time in other tasks: marketing, management, and product development. By the second half of 2004 I was not coding any longer. We have learned many things in Torrenegra since then. Our development methodology has significantly improved. I didn’t want to miss the fun, nor did I want my programming skills to get rusty. That is why I decided I would code something, even if it was small, for LetMeGo.
Following up on the “aha!” moment we had in reference to our ticketing system (Cockerr), I decided to code version 0.2 of it. By doing it myself I would get to code again and I would allow Germán to focus on another scope. The experience was awesome. I invested the first day setting up the development environment in my Mac. Next day I installed OTRS and learned about its architecture. OTRS is written in Perl. The third day, with the help of the entire team, I set up a SOAP environment for OTRS so that other subsystems of the LetMeGo could connect to it. Finally, on Saturday, I learned something really new: PHP and CakePHP. I love CakePHP. CakePHP is very friendly. I know, I know: there many other frameworks that may be as friendly as CakePHP. Such is the case of Catalyst for Perl, Ruby on Rails, etc. In my opinion, CakePHP has many advantages: it is more popular than Catalyst and PHP is much, much quicker, than Ruby. What about Struts for Java? I haven’t used it, but colleagues have told me it is more strict than necessary for most web development applications.
I am almost half way through the development of Cockerr 0.2, but for now I have to go back to do product development: writing use cases, doing quality assurance, etc. I look forward to continue coding Cockerr as soon as I can… probably more than I look forward meeting some of my ex-girlfriends. Please don’t tell them, though.
By the way, thanks a lot to Andres, Henry, Germán, and Lucho for helping me out with the many questions I had.
Alexander Torrenegra
Alexander is LetMeGo's co-founder and jefe. Here is his LetMeGo 
