As the world turns

Well, all things come to an end. (Both the good and the bad, but not the ugly without plastic surgery.) Life's book has to have conclusions and chapters must end so the story can continue. The next chapter in my professional life will be as a contractor in DC with my first gig at National Geographic.

I have been very blessed in my life and was extremely fortunate to work at The Washington Post for the past 2 years. I thank God for the opportunity to meet and work with one of the best christian mentors I've ever had, Steven King, and everything that he did for me professionally, personally, and spiritually. I also enjoyed spending so many hours hanging out, err, *cough I mean working with one of my college buddies, Jesse Foltz. In that time I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming that I was actually being paid to both program in Python and use the Django web framework all while hanging out and working with world class people. I have, without a doubt, grown by leaps and bounds. The largest portion of my professional growth as a programmer is due to none other than Jesse for all the chop-busting :)

When I accepted the original job as an Innovations Developer (internally: Web Ninja) I had no idea that it would lead me to work for a strong Christian manager and eventually a position as a Senior Developer. I also never expected I would get to brainstorm and build just down-right awesome stuff with Jesse. I leave the Post with sadness that our team is no more. I didn't know that I would get to architect and build systems that would power mission critical roles. I certainly never imagined I would have 1 on 1 access to the system administrators and eventually count them as my closest friends. There has, unquestionably, been no other experience in my life that compares to the feeling like you have all the resources of a Fortune 500 company data center at your disposal and getting to use all the cool toys like Isilon storage systems and Splunk. But enough of the nerdy stuff... :D

I'm moving on to a company called Celerity to help start their web practice (which has a strong focus on Django) and, again, my first spot is Nat Geo. Can I just say that it is awesome to walk through halls that have domes that light up like the galaxy and scale models of the Grand Canyon that fill the ceiling space in the elevator lobby? I am very much at home there :)

My new supervisor, Drew Engelson, is a fantastic guy and has years of experience with Amazon's cloud services and large Django systems (he was chief architect at PBS previously) so I can't wait to see what kind of growth opportunities this will provide. I actually took the job to work for him since I figured it wasn't every day that you get to pick your mentor.

I started full time last Tuesday and my gut reaction about Drew is spot on. Top notch, very bright, and considerate. I truly hope I have the opportunity to be more involved directly with him and the growth of our part of the company.

Here's to tomorrow! Cheers :)