Software, Work, and Learning
My last day at my old job. Thinking back, I'm appalled to realize how little I learned over the past year working there. Almost everything was a rehash of what I've done before or work that wasn't worth doing. And I'd already had the experience of watching bad management run a perfectly good company into the ground. It hadn't hit me before, because I've learned so much outside of my day job. My other milestone today was that I finally finished the first alpha version of Chrysalis and sent out an announcement to a bunch of other developers I know. Even if it never goes beyond being a vanity project, the time and effort I've invested have totally been worth it. I've deepened and refined my skills, learned lots of new stuff (ant, xml, html, various dusty corners of Java, etc.), and put together something that amounts to an on-line portfolio of my work. I don't know if my new employer looked at Chrysalis after I told them about it, but I think they were at least impressed by the fact that I'd done my own Open Source project and was more than willing to show them my actual code. Slam-dunking most of their interview questions probably helped, too ;-).

I'm looking forward to the new job. It will be real learning experience, I have no doubt, and there's good reason to be optimistic about how successful they'll be. I want to write a book about high-performance techniques in Oracle and this will be the perfect job to give me lots of real-world feedback. Work on Chrysalis will slow down for a little while, but that's OK. It's got enough momentum now to sustain itself for a long time; I expect to be working on it for the next few years.