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I'm writing this from a hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Two weeks ago I would never have guessed that I'd be here now, but life is funny that way...
I had been nominally looking for a full-time job since October when I got back from my trip to Great Britain. I hadn't actually gotten around to applying for jobs; a few recruiter cold-calls had led to a few interviews last month, but nothing panned out. Then, the weekend before last, a friend and former co-worker, John Valente, got in touch asking if I was available for some work. Back in the summer, I had forwarded a job listing I saw on the Lisp Jobs blog to him, because I knew he was looking (and we had both done Lisp at our previous job, Gensym). Well, they (MCNA Dental) had ended up hiring him, and now they were looking for more Lisp programmers—in particular, ones who also had some Ruby experience. And since I did a Ruby contract in summer 2010, John figured I'd be a good candidate.
After some discussion, I agreed that I'd be a good candidate too. They were willing to have me work remotely from Boston; we discussed working on a full-time contract basis, but it seemed better for both parties to have me work as a salaried employee. But they wanted me to come down to their HQ in Fort Lauderdale ASAP so that I could meet the team (including someone who was visiting from Germany for a week) and participate in some planning meetings. So, on Friday I received and accepted an offer by email, I flew down on Monday afternoon (did you know JetBlue has four daily non-stop flights from Boston to Fort Lauderdale?), and yesterday I showed up in the office for my first day of work. I'll be here for a couple weeks, flying back to Boston on Christmas Eve.
After two days, I'm starting to get a handle on the job. It's a bit of a fixer-upper, in that they have a lot of old Ruby code written 6+ years ago by an outsource team, and a lot of new Lisp code that isn't yet ready to replace the Ruby app. So I'll mostly be helping to get the Ruby code modernized and cleaned up to be maintainable, and then at some point move over to the Lisp team to help finish building the replacement system. It's an internal web app for managing dental insurance claims and providers, so nothing particularly sexy, but it'll be fun to be writing Ruby and Lisp code anyway.
It's all still a little surreal, though, to suddenly be in Florida in December with a full-time job. This weekend I'm planning to get some well-earned relaxation by playing some disc golf and then cooling off with a dip in the ocean. Happy Holidays...
I had been nominally looking for a full-time job since October when I got back from my trip to Great Britain. I hadn't actually gotten around to applying for jobs; a few recruiter cold-calls had led to a few interviews last month, but nothing panned out. Then, the weekend before last, a friend and former co-worker, John Valente, got in touch asking if I was available for some work. Back in the summer, I had forwarded a job listing I saw on the Lisp Jobs blog to him, because I knew he was looking (and we had both done Lisp at our previous job, Gensym). Well, they (MCNA Dental) had ended up hiring him, and now they were looking for more Lisp programmers—in particular, ones who also had some Ruby experience. And since I did a Ruby contract in summer 2010, John figured I'd be a good candidate.
After some discussion, I agreed that I'd be a good candidate too. They were willing to have me work remotely from Boston; we discussed working on a full-time contract basis, but it seemed better for both parties to have me work as a salaried employee. But they wanted me to come down to their HQ in Fort Lauderdale ASAP so that I could meet the team (including someone who was visiting from Germany for a week) and participate in some planning meetings. So, on Friday I received and accepted an offer by email, I flew down on Monday afternoon (did you know JetBlue has four daily non-stop flights from Boston to Fort Lauderdale?), and yesterday I showed up in the office for my first day of work. I'll be here for a couple weeks, flying back to Boston on Christmas Eve.
After two days, I'm starting to get a handle on the job. It's a bit of a fixer-upper, in that they have a lot of old Ruby code written 6+ years ago by an outsource team, and a lot of new Lisp code that isn't yet ready to replace the Ruby app. So I'll mostly be helping to get the Ruby code modernized and cleaned up to be maintainable, and then at some point move over to the Lisp team to help finish building the replacement system. It's an internal web app for managing dental insurance claims and providers, so nothing particularly sexy, but it'll be fun to be writing Ruby and Lisp code anyway.
It's all still a little surreal, though, to suddenly be in Florida in December with a full-time job. This weekend I'm planning to get some well-earned relaxation by playing some disc golf and then cooling off with a dip in the ocean. Happy Holidays...