Well, I've been on the job for 2 days now, and I'm feeling the pain of new technologies. Believe it or not, I just got my first smart phone on Monday. I'm cheap, and have never been able to bring myself to pay more than $20 a month for cell coverage, so smartphones were out of the question. I can say that learning to use an android phone has been a challenge, but a wonderful experience. I feel more connected, and love the ability to access things when I'm away from home. I'm sure I'll feel the leash that comes with it soon enough, but overall I'm thrilled to finally be carrying a modern phone.
My new laptop, however, is another story. I got my first mac yesterday, a nice new macbook pro. I will say that the size and battery life are a wonderful step up from the Dell I had when I worked at Lockheed. Learning a new OS, however, is killing me. I feel kinda clueless when I have to use Google or ask a friend just to figure out simple things like, where is my terminal? How do install apps? I don't care what they say, the idea that Apple products "just work" is laughable to me. I'm still trying to find an email client that I'm happy with. That said, it's been one day, so I'm sure that OS X will grow on me. The sad thing is that I'm probably a month away from hating Windows and OS X. I'll be one of those dual users who is always wishing for the features of the OS I'm not using at the moment.
The final challenge, which I will start today, is the new software stack. CareKinesis is using a lot of tools that I've only read about. I'm thrilled for the challenge of learning new software, and the joy of finding great ways to use it to make myself more effective, but I'm also very aware of how mentally straining it will be to learn 2 or 3 new tools per day for a few weeks. Meanwhile, my 2 man team will be making some major decisions in the next few weeks about some additional tech we want to add to the stack. There will be a lot of brain drain for a while, but it's going to be a fun ride.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
A grand new adventure
On Friday the 7th of February, I will officially end my career at Lockheed Martin, after almost 8 years. It has been a wild ride, but I'm glad to see it end. perhaps in a week or two I'll write more on why I'm glad to leave, but for today I want to focus on what's next for me. My grand new adventure.
On the 24th I'll start me new job at a small healthcare company, CareKinesis. The company is focused on medication management, essentially helping manage the drug regimen for people who take lots of different pills on a daily basis. We write software to handle the prescription process, have a call center, a pharmacy, etc. My role will be as a "Developer Happiness Engineer", and it will be awesome. As we roll things out, I plan to blog about the details, and keep all of you up to date. I'm particularly excited about this company because they are so open and community friendly. This new opportunity will let me contribute to open source more, blog more, and generally be involved in the software community, and I'm psyched about it.
What's a Developer Happiness Engineer? Glad you asked. The job is simple, do everything you can to ensure the development team is happy, and never has to do anything that isn't fun. We automate builds, integration, testing, and deployment. We then layer monitoring and alerting on top of that, with a super awesome dashboard to give you instant insight into all of the above. The idea is that, eventually, a developer will be able to write new code, push a button, and 5 minutes later, their code will be on the production system. They can then look at graphs that show the tests passing, the integration work succeeding, and various metrics of system performance, with lines indicating when their code hit the various systems. They can look to see if their memory bug really got fixed, their compression scheme worked, or if their refresh times really went down. We've got a long way to go to get to that point, but it will be a fun ride. If you want to know more about what this sort of system looks like, take a look at codeascraft.com (Etsy's blog). They're already doing most of this, and are basically the gold standard for it.
Anyhow, that's what's next for me, and I'm super excited to get started.
On the 24th I'll start me new job at a small healthcare company, CareKinesis. The company is focused on medication management, essentially helping manage the drug regimen for people who take lots of different pills on a daily basis. We write software to handle the prescription process, have a call center, a pharmacy, etc. My role will be as a "Developer Happiness Engineer", and it will be awesome. As we roll things out, I plan to blog about the details, and keep all of you up to date. I'm particularly excited about this company because they are so open and community friendly. This new opportunity will let me contribute to open source more, blog more, and generally be involved in the software community, and I'm psyched about it.
What's a Developer Happiness Engineer? Glad you asked. The job is simple, do everything you can to ensure the development team is happy, and never has to do anything that isn't fun. We automate builds, integration, testing, and deployment. We then layer monitoring and alerting on top of that, with a super awesome dashboard to give you instant insight into all of the above. The idea is that, eventually, a developer will be able to write new code, push a button, and 5 minutes later, their code will be on the production system. They can then look at graphs that show the tests passing, the integration work succeeding, and various metrics of system performance, with lines indicating when their code hit the various systems. They can look to see if their memory bug really got fixed, their compression scheme worked, or if their refresh times really went down. We've got a long way to go to get to that point, but it will be a fun ride. If you want to know more about what this sort of system looks like, take a look at codeascraft.com (Etsy's blog). They're already doing most of this, and are basically the gold standard for it.
Anyhow, that's what's next for me, and I'm super excited to get started.
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