[/caption]For the last year I've worked as the Director of New Media and Web Development for 614 Media Group. It's a lofty title, meant to inspire all who read my email signature that, "Hey this guy is a bigshot." In reality what I did was much more mundane, I wrote LAMP applications. For the last year I've sat down everyday at this Mac, popped into TextMate, and wrote PHP. I was king of the castle, and being king is good, I got to choose my tools: Mac + TextMate + Git + MAMP + MacGDBp + GitHub + GitHub Issues + Flourish. I got to work on interesting products, if you had told me a year ago that in a year's time I would have written both a Groupon Competitor and a full CMS system, I would have told you that was crazy talk.
Over the last year I have grown as a developer and as a system administrator and as someone trying to get traction for a new product and as a million other hats I got to wear. For the first time in my career I was able to go from concept to "functioning-putting-money-in-the-bank" web application. This is huge. Having been a consultant for years before this job, I spent most of my time maintaining other peoples systems, throwing in a feature here or there, coding up a new report, stuff like that. At 614 I was able to start from nothing, build up a database schema, create the framework and the code, paint it all pretty, launch, iterate, relaunch, iterate, tear my hair out, wake up to fix problems at 3am, curse the server for being slightly different than development, drink more caffeine than any human should drink, but most importantly learn and grow.
With learning and growing in mind, I have an announcement to make, at the end of this month I will be leaving my job at 614 Media Group. I leave on a good note though, the software is stable and quietly humming along bringing in revenue. I am leaving behind a framework with a proven track record, a stable foundation that can be built upon. But most importantly I'm leaving as a friend and supporter of 614, wishing them nothing but the best for the future. 614's curse is that they put a lot of responsibility into your hands and if you are good at it, other people will take notice, and those other people may come in and make you an offer you can't refuse.
[caption id="attachment_935" align="alignleft" width="245" caption="They made me an offer I couldn't refuse"]
[/caption]I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say about the new position, but I will be moving out to the West Coast this month to start a new chapter in my career. For the PHP folks out there, do not worry, I will still be rocking PHP (but also probably rocking some ruby and java as well and anything else they want me to learn). This is a big, stressful, somewhat scary decision to make, but I believe in the company that I will be joining, and after meeting with their people am nothing but excited to work with and learn from them.
Growth and change are good things, they can be painful and stressful and sad sometimes, but the minute you stop growing as a developer you've given up, and I love programming too much to give up. This next month is going to be a blur of packing and moving and unpacking and learning a new area and learning a new codebase and new people and new places. Parts of it will be uncomfortable, parts will be stressful, but overall it will be a learning experience I couldn't get anywhere else, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
