I can now blog about this. During the past couple weeks I’ve been in the process of pursuing a new programming opportunity. As of April 15th I will be leaving my current position and joining the Fujitsu Consulting team. This will be a big step forward for my career as I get involved in larger projects with larger teams using “newer” technologies. I qualify newer because of the relative nature between what I am using now vs. future.
Currently my team (all two of us) are using VB.NET with a SQL 2000 backend. Not all that bad one thinks when they see that (sure it could be C#, but it’s still .NET). I thought this when I interviewed for the position, but have come to find that the application of the technology is perhaps more important than the technology itself. The current code being written for the project looks and feels very much like it was cut and pasted straight out of VB6. While that’s not all bad, why not make use of the more advanced features of .NET. I don’t believe that you have to use the technology that is there, but you should explore it’s capabilities and make conscious choices not to use a feature or functionality in the language. For instance, inheritance. The combobox in .NET does not, by default, support a type-ahead feature. Instead of creating a class that inherits the standard combobox and adds the desired type-ahead functionality, every KeyUp event, for every combobox in the application has code written to handle the type-ahead. So, I’m hoping that this change to a larger and, as I’ve been told, very technically advanced group of developers will push me once again to strive for coding elegance.
When I presented my resignation to my supervisor, the result was that he would like to debrief me next week. The desired result of this debriefing is to leverage my skill, knowledge and experience in projects to help them avoid any pitfalls going forward. Oddly, in 3 months of employment I have not been asked or required to help in this manner. I’ve actually been isolated from design, analysis and most all parts of the codebase. Perhaps it’s a case of realizing what you have when you are going to loose it.

Overall, I’m happy to be leaving my current position and I’m extremely excited about moving to Fujitsu.