Friday was my last day working in Ann Arbor (1hr away, by car, 4 by train/bike) at Greenview Data. At Greenview I had helped to build an email archiving system, writing mainly Ruby and Perl code using Agile (XP) development practices. Two of the best years of my career were spent there - I learned so much and discovered who I was as a software craftsman. My coworkers there helped keep me accountable and we had a great time learning together new concepts and some neat tools. In the end, we have an email archiving system that provides discoverability and redundancy across 3 data centers in the US.
The biggest change in the last year has been my migration from graphic IDEs and text editors to vim. Once I discovered its underlying philosophy, I was hooked. Now Linux has returned as my development platform of choice. Linux especially works well when working with Ruby C extensions.
This next week I’ll be finishing some work for the State of Michigan and then February begins my work at BrighterPlanet! Conservation, sustainability, and environmental stewardship have become hot issues for me over the past three years. I’m really excited to be working on that front as a Rails developer developing apps that help people start thinking about their relationship with the environment and helping some grassroots environmental projects get started through the company’s project fund. When I found BrighterPlanet’s open telecommuting position, I couldn’t pass it up.
So now I will be working from home during the day. Julie and I have been setting up the office as our coworking facility and I’ve been tinkering around with my old PC to see if it’s usable as a Linux development platform. I also got a nice 22” Dell monitor (same components as Apple LCDs) to reduce neck straining with my laptop. It also doubles as our TV :)
2010 is already shaping up to be an excellent year!