The past years, months and weeks have had a huge amount of change wrapped up within them for me. Much of that change had immediate effects, but some of it has been more subtle. There are three major effects which are manifesting at the present time: a new career, a new job, and a new blog. All are manifesting at the year boundary which is, for some reason, the usual for major change in my life.
First, I am embarking on a new career, that of a software craftsman. I have been a CFML developer for over a decade, and while it has earned me a nice income, it hasn't been terribly fulfilling. CFML itself is part of the problem, but the places where CFML is widely accepted and adopted are a bigger portion. I seem to be quite proficient at using CFML to build web applications above spec and under budget, but I've come to realize over the years that my objectives are within the craft of software development, not in making piles of money.
Facilitating this shift of focus is a change of jobs. I've worked at Mentor Graphics for just over five years and the team I have been a part of has grown in leaps and bounds. We have morphed from a group of CommonSpot hackers to a team responsible for a pile of CFML, Python, and PHP applications, along with all the infrastructure to run it scalably and reliably. It's worth mentioning that our team is a chunk of Mentor's corporate marketing department, and our IT department comes to us for expert opinions. I have given my notice and my last day at Mentor will be January 6th, 2012.
On the 9th I will be starting a new job with a company providing healthcare information management and analytics software. The company (ARMUS) recently was acquired by Burr Pilger Mayer (the largest accounting firm in California), though it still runs as a largely autonomous division within. The team is small, the projects are fast, the impact is huge, and the business puts the focus is on internal quality not just external deliverables. Plus it's centered around huge masses of data and the extraction of interesting information, which is something I'm quite fond of. I don't think it's coincidence that Kim is an epidemiologist, doing the job ARMUS's software is intended to facilitate.
Finally, I'm moving my online home to programmerluddite.com instead of barneyb.com. You can read more about the reasons over there. I'll still be writing about software development and whatever else suits my fancy, but starting afresh. This will be the final post I make on this blog, excepting a couple updates to a couple open source projects in the coming month.
This sort of "leave everything behind" transition is very uncharacteristic of my nature. However, in this case I feel that a transition would be exactly the opposite of what is needed. Yes, that means you'll need to update your feed readers, but no content is changing homes. The downloads, post links, and comment subscriptions here on BarneyBlog will remain exactly as before, as will all the other bits and pieces on barneyb.com.
Hope to see you all over at my new home, though I will probably be rather quiet for a bit as the rest of this welling change stabilizes.
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