February 14, 2007 – First Day at Westgate Resorts

Originally posted on LiveJournal.

So Monday I started at my new job at Westgate resorts on Sandlake by the hospital. In two days there I’ve been extremely impressed with the place. It’s so incredibly different in the way things are handled.

At FCE for instance tickets from customers would come in to the project manager, they’d assign it to the developer who either wasn’t busy or was trained in whatever the ticket was, and then it would b their problem until it was completed. The only person you could ever go to for help was the person who submitted the ticket because your project manager doesn’t know anything about the problem, they just forward it to you.

Now however theres a manager screening tickets, a business analyst responsible for it and me, the programmer, responsible for actually doing it. I haven’t even done anything yet but it’s great having 2 people knowledgeable about the problem in my department to go to for help, in addition to the technical lead who would probably have some direction on the ticket even though they weren’t directly involved with it. I’m really looking forward to starting the actual coding in a week or so. So what will I be doing? Looks like it’s going to be all Java/Spring stuff, with Coldfusion and Flex for the frontend. Looks like I’ll finally get some decent UML modeling experience as well which should be a great asset. The software in the repository I’ve looked at so far is impressively built and easy to maintain too. Anyways I still love Coldfusion (I actually got certified last friday), but it’s about time to expand into a few related technologies.