April 30, 2008 – New Job?

Looks like May will be a month of change after all. Got the offer from Izea for a new position, and although it’s only a modest raise, and more work, I’m going to accept it. One of the niceties of small software teams is how incredibly fast they can respond to change, making the coding (the part we actually want to do) more a part of our jobs. So much of the work at Westgate has gone from that to time spent putting tickets/requests through the process that very little work is done. Actually, today I didn’t write a line of code – I prepared some stuff to be deployed to production for most the day (since that guy is on vacation and there’s no backup for him) and then talked about some pending projects I’m playing a part in. This type of position at westgate (devoted to non-coding) seems to be going around, and when someone gets tasked with it for too lon they end up leaving. The project there are still fun, but when your time is allocated 50% on a project, 40% requests/bug fixes, 10% mentoring and you don’t get to any of those you know something is up. Being split up like that sucks in the first place. You can never spend “half” your time on something. Context switching and setup between drastically different subjects takes time in the first place. Not to mention that the 40% bug fixes might be 10 different things as well. Anyways, this should be a great opportunity. I’d been following Izea for a while, and I’m excited as can be to be headed there. Nice to see how well they treat their employees too — with 24″ macs, 15″ macbook pros, comfy chairs and all. Not to mention scrum/XP for development, complete with TDD — which should be the biggest change in the way I develop. It’ll be a lot of learning, but should force me into a cleaner programming style with much greater test coverage. I’m excited that I’ll be working downtown too. For once I won’t have to drive when I want to go out for lunch. Nate and Joey are close by as well which is cool. They have a pretty sweet office too which helps. Looks like May 26th will be my start date. If anyone else works downtown, let me know!