Journal Journal: It's All Good
Brian has left the building!
Yep, I'm a few days late on this, but I'm done working for Uncle Pete. That is, in the direct sense. Now I'm working for his little sister, Seline. If this doesn't make sense, don't worry. I'm just trying to keep it vague enough to write about.
After 4 years of progressive horribleness at the former, I was finally able to break away and get a transfer to M&S to do development full time. So, how is it so far? Umm... uneventful. I know I'm just getting started, but that's the problem. I'm not *getting started.* I am going to need at least a little direction to meet this end-of-year deadline.
I'm coming into a completely new codebase, and several new frameworks: J2EE, Spring, Maven, Hibernate... all the buzzwords. Which will be great on a resume, providing I can figure it all out. I don't have any training or experience in any of these technologies (save for a 2 day class on Maven). So yes, I'm green. But I'm ready to get started.
Aside from the lack of movement so far, I'm still pretty stoked to be here. The days of waking up to 300+ email notifications in the morning because the WebLogic or ColdFusion environment was down are over. The environment so far seems like I will be mostly left alone to do the things I need to do, and as long as I do them, people will continue to leave me alone. I'm mostly unimpressed with the current staff, tech skill-wise. They are enterprise people. They know their way around the technologies they need to make them good at work, but not much interest outside of that.
That's ok. I'm keeping myself sharp by taking a class on Artificial Intelligence through Stanford. It's really testing me. Bayes networks are not the easiest thing I've studied. Along with that, I'm trying to keep up with a 7 Languages in 7 Weeks class. I committed to teaching Erlang, so I have to at least do that much. So far, I've dived into Ruby, and gotten to know it at least a little. And I've started on Io, but haven't gotten far. That's falling behind. Gotta step it up.
So yes, keeping myself sharp is good. I have a feeling I will be very good here in a few months. It's going to take some time and a lot of practice and learning. I already feel good coming over here. Like a huge weight was lifted off my chest. The quality of life was so low at the last job, I don't know how anyone lasts more than a year. Good luck to that fucking team.
I also installed Good Mobile Messaging on my phone and got rid of my BlackBerry piece of shit. Not sure if I will like the notifications, but maybe I can turn them off. And I bought a bunch of extra batteries for my Droid X so I don't have to worry about it dying after 3 hours. Turns out, it was just that battery. I got a couple new ones and they will last all day on continuous use.
Point is, things are good.