townx

My time at OpenAdvantage comes to an end this Friday. It's been a great experience for me, and perhaps the best job I've had so far: freedom to follow my instincts, suggest strategy, engage in a broad range of activities (writing, training, presenting, programming, analysis, consultancy, organising events, you name it), and evangelise open source. Plus working with a great bunch of people, in a friendly and relaxed environment.

But the project was due to come to an end, and I felt like I needed a change anyway, and went off looking for jobs. (By the way, it hasn't come to an end, and will be continuing without me; the base for the project is now the Technology Innovation Centre, based at Millenium Point in Birmingham.) In the end, I took a position at Talis as a Software Engineer. They build library systems and are heavily into open data and the semantic web; they also utilise quite a bit of open source internally. I can't say I am without fear: I haven't been a full-time programmer for a few years, and the team I'm joining is disciplined and highly intelligent. But I need the challenge, and feel I need to prove to myself that I can work as a commercial programmer. I've worked full time as a developer before, but never as part of a tight team, using agile techniques. It will be good for me to have that experience.

So, the last couple of weeks, I've been trying hard to prepare by freshening my skills, concentrating on those which are core to Talis. This has meant learning Spring (mainly from the marvellous Spring in Action) and finding out more about design patterns (via the direct, fun Head First Design Patterns and the more heavy but still excellent Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture). Along the way, I've been perusing/learning/relearning Java Server Faces, Tomcat, JSP, Tiles, Ant, Log4j, Hibernate, JUnit, EasyMock, and probably a few other things. There's a lot to take in, and my brain groans at times (especially when it reaches 1.00am and I'm still nibbling away at something), but it's been enjoyable so far. Though I could do without dreaming about Java Beans.