2:43 PM - PRIME
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.