Last Friday was my last day at PRIME. I met with several
former coworkers at Grizzly Peak for some beer. Caryn came
about half way through and we had a lovely dinner out afterwards at
Cottage Inn. It was a very relaxing night.
Many of you know why I left PRIME. I did enjoy the
programming and some of the administration work. I miss
designing large systems and having employees work under me. I
don't miss the upper management style. I think I'll leave it
at that.
I had a coworker contact me today about a configuration setting
on the dev server at PRIME. It took almost a week before they
wrote me an email. I'm impressed.
I am a bit curious how they're doing, but it might be best I
don't know.
I'm currently looking for a new developer position. I'd
prefer something with Java, C#, C, C++, or Visual Basic. I
don't really know Objective-C well enough to go that route.
I had a phone interview and scheduled another for Monday. So far,
I've got my resume out to 17 companies for various development
positions.
Some of you might not know what I did at PRIME. I worked
on web applications (websites) that collected article data and
evaluations on content from various sources. This included
news outlets, magazines, websites, blogs, twitter, and other RSS
feeds. The content was then stored and analyzed or placed
into a newsletter tool that I also wrote. Newsletters were
sent out daily to fortune 500 companies in HTML, Text or PDF
format. I find it rather crazy that CEO's of large companies
you've heard of were looking at newsletters my software made.
I also managed 9 servers including Linux and FreeBSD systems
and managed the IT resources in Ann Arbor. It was like 3 jobs
in 1. I went from intern to senior software engineer in 1
year. It was a wild ride.
I had some interesting requests like storing every tweet on
twitter or 1 million articles a year including translations in 6
languages. I developed software that could scale close to
that, but the complexity of the system made it hard to scale out
and limited resources prevented scale up as well. I had many ideas
for optimizing the system and even more to improve the work
flow.
I'm not under an NDA, but I don't think it's right to get too
specific in a blog. Let's just say I wanted to migrate from
hundreds of distinct data sources to a centrally managed system and
there was a lot of resistance.