An excellent question. Where have I been?
In the past 12 months I have gotten married, switched jobs, adopted a kitten and moved back to the big city. You could say I’ve been in quite a few places doing any number of things. To explain though, I left WeatherFlow to return to Orlando to be closer to friends and family. Working there was perhaps the best decision I had made as I was able to learn quite a few technologies in a short amount of time, meet some very bright and driven people, as well as work on some amazing projects. If it wasn’t for WeatherFlow I wouldn’t be where I am today.
Where is that, you ask?
Well, I’m currently working for one of the largest defense contractors in the world. I work for the division which creates internal HR Applications for the company. Definitely a change from my usual 6-12 developers in a room and rapid application development. I picked up some legacy ColdFusion code and helped the team hit a couple releases before I was reassigned. From there I joined a small VB.NET/ASP.NET development team working on some internal applications which were eventually shelved, or made it into Phase II.
During the colder months I took on a stretch assignment to help another team which had been working with a 3rd party software vendor. Essentially, I have been testing and deploying the application for our internal team and managing the correspondence with the vendor. I’ve been learning our software engineering process, IIS configuration, account provisioning, writing SOI’s, hosting meetings and trying my hand at application deployment and environment configuration. Really, it has been a great learning experience thus far and I am looking forward to this new fiscal year.
Where do I go from here?
I am hoping to post more code on this blog, as well as start a few new projects on the side. I have a small Pandora/iTunes mashup written in VB.NET/ASP.NET 3.5 which needs a home. Hopefully I can find some hosting shortly and get that one up and running.
This year my goals are lofty:
- Learn ASP.NET MVC with C# & jQuery
- Learn Python & Django
- Learn Ruby on Rails
- Get Certified, whether its an MCPD or MCTS just do it.
- Write something useful.
- Become a better technologist and developer.
As always, I want to keep current and stay on top of the industry changes, and filter out the hype from the reality. Agile this, rails that are great things to investigate but what is the business case? What is the need? Hopefully this year I can find the time to publish some articles recounting those very things from my own point of view.
I hope that brings everyone up to date. I am still here, and hopefully I’ll be posting more in the weeks to come.
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