My New Job

So let me tell you about my new job. I have joined CrazedCoders, a small consulting firm based in Edmonton. Much of its work has been with the Flex tool but they have taken on considerable back-end work in Java. Contractors and staff have handled the Java work in the past and I am the first hire to work on it full-time.

I work on a small office in downtown Vancouver. I can get there in a half hour by bike or bus. There's one other employee there, and occasionally we're joined by a contractor who mostly works at home. There's just a front room and a back room in the office. I have one of the two window seats.

Our office is on Pender at Richards and is nicely located: we're two blocks from the start of Water street and Gastown, and a block from shopping on Granville, and a few blocks further from Robson. So far I know of four coffee shops within a block, the closest serving Illy beans, right below us. I also know of a few pubs nearby. On our ground floor are lots of small cafes: one can get sushi, sandwiches, wraps, salads and pizza slices from several sources.

I work on a pretty herky ThinkPad laptop. It's got high specs, a screen resolution so high I need to wear my reading glasses, and is nearly indestructible with a spillproof keyboard and shock protection for the disk drive. At the office it connects to a second monitor, and I can take it home whenever I want.

I'm in that state you always start a job in, where you don't know the systems you're working on, you have new tools to learn quickly, and you feel dumb as a brick.

I like my coworkers. One of the Edmonton staff flew over last Thursday to deliver this laptop and spend the day doing knowledge transfer. We all had dinner that night, and I've started a tradition of pub lunches on Fridays.

It's nice to be working with a small team, but I wouldn't mind having a few more people around to meet and socialise with. I also have less opportunity to learn from others; I think I'll be spending more time online and in books.

It's great to be working again, to be busy. I look forward to getting more confident with these systems and tools and be cranking out great code.