Last bit of cleanup.. before my new gig kicks off

11/04

So, I’ve spent the last week or so talking up the new gig that I’ll be starting. Yes, as some of you may have heard I’ve been talking to the folks who run the Deathstar about the possibility of long time employment.
Seriously though, things should get mighty interesting.

I’ve been asked if I had lost my damn mind in taking a job at a place that 18months ago sent not so nice cease and deists. But hear me out, for starters I’ve kinda always wanted a research gig, the open endedness* of my brain likes to be able to question conventional thought and build the things that make my life easier.
*(not a real word)

Not many people would think that a vacuum controlled by a Nintendo Wii remote is that useful, but if you had a vacuum that knew your houseplan would vacuum it without bumping into things and tell you when to clean out the bag… well that is a whole other thing.

THAT my friends is what R&D effectively is, it’s a forum to test wild ideas in the hopes that you can some how make something useful.

So, when I was asked a couple weeks ago to test the waters with a HUGE mega-company like AT&T in an R&D like role I jumped at the chance. The division that I would be working in is run by people that I can say genuinely appreciate the need for creative engineers and they wanna stock the pool with them. So I get a two-fer; work on cool stuff AND work with cool people.

Not looking so bad now is it?

Plus the folks who work there really love open-source software which is a very big deal to me. I get enough shit from my fellow OS pals about not being open enough w/ my code. I am setting on a whole slew of checkins that I need to write testcases for but that is a post for another date.  Back to talking about “work”; my director is an active contributor to a Ruby framework and he really enjoys spending his weekends and afternoons coding improvements. Those are the types of managers most geeks dream about, the kind that can actually write code and it’s all the better if they then give it away.  See, it’s the guys and gals who do it on the weekend who make software cool and I’d be a fool to pass on the chance to work as passionate as I am.

While yes, I will probably continue to poke fun at the hand that will soon feed me. I just hope that they keep giving me the room to build cool stuff.

To me, it sounds like a damn cool symbiotic relationship.