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.