Dot Eee Dee Yoo
O-taaay… first week back in the working world. Impressions?
After taking two years off, Monday I started working for www.edvisors.com, a small company that provides information and tools to help students navigate the admissions, financial aid, and loans tangle surrounding higher ed. So far it seems like a good group of people, and the company is growing after surviving some challenges resulting from 2008’s big credit crisis.
As a marketing/product company, it’s quite a change from the consulting lifestyle, but I think it’ll be a positive. Since much of their business moves in step with the academic calendar, hours and stress levels should be more predictable. And there’s essentially no travel, which is both good and bad, as you might imagine.
Although they have some properties that are oriented toward grad students, the majority of their user base are high schoolers and undergrads, so their user demographic has huge implications for site design. Although there’s not much happening in the mobile space yet, it’s definitely being talked about, which is really exciting to me both as a designer and developer.
My title is UI Team Lead, which means I have some degree of strategic input, which fits with my level of experience, but I’m still expected to do plenty of the hands-on coding work that I love. There’s some people management, but it’s really a team environment, and it’s too small to get all crazy about hierarchy.
At around two dozen people, the company sometimes feels similar to my previous tenure at Business Innovation. But unlike BI there’s a frontend practice whose design methodology and process I can help build.
As a minor sideline, the company funds a separate charitable education foundation that was founded by the owner and his father, who was a prominent educator and administrator. It funds local and national educational opportunities, especially for disadvantaged youth.
Technically, they’re a PHP shop and are mostly using the Kohana framework. It’s also a Mac shop, which is going to be a change for me, tho not a huge one. The transition is made easier by the fact that they gave me a MacBook Pro i7, which has two 2.66 GHz cores and 8GB of memory; in other words, the machine screams! It’s delivering 3 times the work as the Dell Latitude that Optaros gave me, and nearly 10x what I can get from my personal Lenovo Z60m. And that’s after I throttled it back to run at only 80 percent capacity!
The office is right in the middle of Quincy Center, so it’s a bearable 40-minute T ride (Green to Red) and reasonably bikeable. It’s 12 miles each way, which is pretty equivalent to my old commute to BI in Woburn. When I ride, I’ll mostly follow the Outriders route, which includes a short section of the Neponset River Trail, which is cool. On the other hand, it also includes Morrissey Boulevard and Granite Ave, which are both nightmarish major arteries, which may drive me to take a more inland route thru JP. It should provide some good base miles this spring, but there are no hills, and the urban streetscape won’t permit real interval training.
So how do I like it after Week One? So far, so good. I think it has a lot of promise, and I’ve yet to uncover any obvious sources of trouble. Of course, I’m sure my attitude will be more effusively positive at the end of the month, when that first infusion of cash hits my balance sheet!