[diary] Last Couple of Weeks
Yesterday was St. Lucia's day. We put up our Xmas New Year's tree! I spent much of the day looking for a tree stand in various closets, without any luck. When sunday evening rolled around, it was the usual island situation -- no car ferries running, the car was on the island, and there was nowhere to buy a tree stand in walking distance. So I rigged up a tree stand out of wholly inappropriate materials. Hey, but it stands now quite nicely (took a bit of calibrating). I'm kind of proud of it, in a perverse Soviet way.
yuki_onna made amazing cookies last night. We decorated the tree, ate cookies, and watched Remember the Titans (I'm struck by a sudden urge to watch sports/football movies. Friday Night Lights is next, and then, Miracle). Cat was my personal St Lucia, with a crown of candles and everything.
(Now every time I walk by the lit up decorated tree, I get such a little kid thrill out of it.)
--
So I've had this new job for about a month now.
I'm quite enchanted with it, even though (especially in this early learning/adjustment period) it's demanding a lot of me.
The feeling of it is like that of a Midterms prep week during a hard semester of college, except without the anxiety and procrastination I had in those days. Every day feels hard, tricky, challenging, satisfying, triumphant, occasionally maddening and frustrating.
I'm working for this company called Local Thunder. And for the first time in my career, I'm really excited about what the company actually does (meaning, I don't just merely like the people I work with, or like a particular project (like the time we wrote a conference portal for ACM Siggraph)). You know how some cities have a Buy Local movement? Portland Maine certainly does -- you see the Buy Local stickers in the windows of local businesses here. And before I even heard of Local Thunder, I was constantly proud of how local-oriented the culture is here.
Well, that's what we do -- make portals for the Buy Local movements of various cities. And that merges with so many of my passions -- about the local food movement, about social and tribal software, and so on. It's a startup, but fairly nicely funded (at least for the next couple of years). There's a ton of responsibility, as I'm the lead developer, and I'm learning a whole lot very quickly (not just the workings of a new company and a new codebase, but a ton about PHP infrastructure, automated testing, continuous integrations, how to lead a Scrum team, etc etc).
So it's been an incredibly intense several weeks. The challenge, of course, is to get used to the workload and set up all the infrastructure so it's running smoothly, so that I have more energy when I come home in the evenings. I remember it was a similar struggle with my previous job, at Uncle Henry's. And it worked out ok then, too.
yuki_onna made amazing cookies last night. We decorated the tree, ate cookies, and watched Remember the Titans (I'm struck by a sudden urge to watch sports/football movies. Friday Night Lights is next, and then, Miracle). Cat was my personal St Lucia, with a crown of candles and everything.
(Now every time I walk by the lit up decorated tree, I get such a little kid thrill out of it.)
--
So I've had this new job for about a month now.
I'm quite enchanted with it, even though (especially in this early learning/adjustment period) it's demanding a lot of me.
The feeling of it is like that of a Midterms prep week during a hard semester of college, except without the anxiety and procrastination I had in those days. Every day feels hard, tricky, challenging, satisfying, triumphant, occasionally maddening and frustrating.
I'm working for this company called Local Thunder. And for the first time in my career, I'm really excited about what the company actually does (meaning, I don't just merely like the people I work with, or like a particular project (like the time we wrote a conference portal for ACM Siggraph)). You know how some cities have a Buy Local movement? Portland Maine certainly does -- you see the Buy Local stickers in the windows of local businesses here. And before I even heard of Local Thunder, I was constantly proud of how local-oriented the culture is here.
Well, that's what we do -- make portals for the Buy Local movements of various cities. And that merges with so many of my passions -- about the local food movement, about social and tribal software, and so on. It's a startup, but fairly nicely funded (at least for the next couple of years). There's a ton of responsibility, as I'm the lead developer, and I'm learning a whole lot very quickly (not just the workings of a new company and a new codebase, but a ton about PHP infrastructure, automated testing, continuous integrations, how to lead a Scrum team, etc etc).
So it's been an incredibly intense several weeks. The challenge, of course, is to get used to the workload and set up all the infrastructure so it's running smoothly, so that I have more energy when I come home in the evenings. I remember it was a similar struggle with my previous job, at Uncle Henry's. And it worked out ok then, too.