The 1st of the month was my 1 month anniversary working for Fresh Consulting. There been a whole lot of crazy and a whole lot of good things that have happened within 1 month of working here:
- Pushed out a new site using a brand new CMS in 2 days.
- Built configurable RSS for existing content for video and text content.
- Implemented the haversine formula into an application to properly sort results by distance.
- Mastered (well better yet got REALLY familiar) with running SVN from the command prompt.
- ...and a few other things along the way.
Wow, Through all of this, I spent probably 90% of my time in PHP, where .Net is really my stronger language at the time, so everything has been lots of learning on the fly. It's been humbling (needing to turn to quite a bit of help and research) and it's been a lot of fun too! Never stop learning I always say. I've also been part of a team brainstorming some ideas for a new site for a client, and working with some online collaboration tools has been really slick too.
The transition process has been a bit more difficult than I had planned. I think that's more due to the unexpected nature of the work I was getting into than anything else. Priorities shift a lot more than I was used to and for the first couple of weeks it was a little crazy to keep up. Fortunately I remembered my faithful Kanban board from before and after a little digging stumbled across Kanbanery, which allows me to have a Kanban board that is shared with my fellow developer AND can be updated via iPod Touch.
After this things got a lot easier to keep dibs on, especially since we pull our tasks from a couple different management tools. I also was able to refine a few of my internal processes a bit more to handle changes a bit quicker. There is a lot more communication going on between me and my fellow programmer, and with screen sharing available through Skype and a few other methods, he's been able to point me in the right direction on issues I've encountered quickly.
In addition, we went ahead and converted the downstairs area from a storage area to an office. There's still some tidy up work to do, but I'm really happy being down here and the kids can come down and visit off and on. Besides, every office needs their own Lego Death Star next to their coffee pot. 8^D We're getting a weatherproof door and tapping into the AC/Heater line in the next week or so to properly heat/cool it during the extreme times of the year
Ultimately I've learned to be even more flexible than I thought I was, which really wasn't much. I'm really enjoying the technology shifts on the fly and it's helping me solidify my knowledge in each language. I get to brainstorm some of the bigger picture concepts for other projects as well. I'm also figuring out how to balance the family time within things, so that I'm not taking too much time out from work to be around the house or vice versa.
There's a plethora of things I'm sure I'm missing here, so feel free to ask if you're curious, but after 1 month in I'm finding my work from home environment very exciting, rewarding, challenging, and the opportunity of a lifetime!