Endings and beginnings
This is the month of transition. 2010 is such an epic-sounding year, and it is only fitting that I have an epic start to my year. Beside ushering in the year of the space-fetus, I started my career shift to working at lulu.com. Today was my last day at Pharsight; Tuesday is my first at Lulu. I will likely be inundated with new information, practices, language features, and an entirely different build cycle. This should be fun.
I assume employees at lulu are called lunatics for a reason, I’m more curious whether this is a gradual process or if it happens all at once. I hope I know by the end of the month which it is. My direct manager is my former manager from Misys, Carl. Ryan, the director of development, is the guy most known for shepherding and developing a large part of Apache 2. The company is headed by Bob Young, previously CEO of Red Hat.
You have no idea how plain happy I am to be working in an environment that is both open-source and mac-based. My friends will all tell you that my least favorite thing about working in an office is the choice of Windows by so many companies. Companies with large IT departments choose Microsoft. A lot of IT people will go home to a mac at night just so they can avoid the tech rain dance that inevitably comes with windows of any vintage. Not having to deal with windows on the daily is a big bonus about my new workplace, and a significant stress reliever.
I also started classes this week. The credits cost about $350, and the books and software etc., ended up about $500. Some of the materials will carry to other semesters such as MS Office (Mac edition) and my English (MLA and general) style guides will carry between semesters at lest. Statistics I will be a challenge because it’s taught more like a humanities course than a maths course.
Expository composition will be interesting but probably not as much as a challenge to me, considering you’re reading one of my drafts. I’m not boasting, but writing isn’t hard for me. Yes, I could stand to tighten up my writing, but I’m someone who picked up Fowler, White and Zinnser for fun. Please, not comments about my grammar; I just came off an entirely too-long 3-hour class.
I’ll try to keep things updated here as I progress through the semester. It’s not something I’ve been diligent about in the past, but the practice will help my assigned writing work.
So, cheers to all my friends at Pharsight, I’ll miss you!