First Week at the New Gig
After departing from my previous place of employment last week, this was my first week at the new job, at a Company Whose Name Shall Not Be Used in Blogs (... restriction that may or may not be part of my employment contract -- but check out my LinkedIn page if you want to know more). Yay! Let's hear if for the Change One Can Believe In.
While it is definitely just the honeymoon period -- and hence all comparisons would be biased and pointless -- I do like the change of pace a lot so far. After extreme complexities at the World's Biggest On-line Retailer (where domain truly is utterly complicated, due to both essential complexity and additional overhead), it is delightful to be able to harbor illusions of possibly understanding end-to-end picture at the new place. There are obviously many systems to consider, but platforms, languages and packages in use are so much more familiar and mainstream than last time I had start from square 1. It is still easy to see purpose of each and every cog of the clockwork; as well as have easy (enough) initial ideas regarding how to build new things and resolve existing problems. And although I have yet to locate a single instance of wstx-3.2.4.jar or such, components seem reasonably up-to-date, and having been chosen quite sensibly. About the only scarily complicated thing seems to be the best practices of using the source control management system (which is more complicated than I have seen in other places, much less than used myself).
But the coolest thing is that potentially I might get to work on two of my top areas-of-generic-interest: large-scale/high-through web services and IR-based technologies (and that's about the extent I can talk about those things -- just that there is something of interest over there). Assuming I can get enough focus this could lead to something interesting, cool AND valuable.
Anyway, I have great expectations for this new beginning.
