What I've been up to lately...

So it's been a while since I've really focused on this blog. Hopefully that will change as my work situation has changed in the last few months. Earlier this year I was released from the consulting firm I had worked at for almost 5 years. Losing my job was not that surprising and ultimately a good thing. I was horribly unhappy at the company and everyone knew it. I have to say I'm much happier now. So where am I and what am I up to? Well first off I'm still living in Boston. And now I'm working in Boston as well. After many months of searching for the right job (I should post on this, like an unemployment retrospective maybe...) I took a position with a local .com company who has been working in the area for over 20 years (previously all phone based). I've joined a small team which will be taking the companies systems to the next level in order to expand and improve our service.

I joined the company almost 2 months ago and came onboard at the tail end of a long running site rebranding project with the addition of a few new features and product offerings. There were definitely some long nights at first but coming from consulting it was nothing really new, I'm used to being thrown to the fire from start of a project (especially with my old company...). Despite the mountain of work in front of us (and lack of any real system architecture or a single unit test in the production code) we released the site successfully. There is still much work to be done but we have received positive feedback (and yes some negative).

One of the things I'm very excited about with the new gig (other than working on a legit, established, profitable, eCommerce) is the opportunity to bring Agile development practices to the team. I'm working under the Director of IT and he and I share many of the same opinions on System Architecture and Development Methodology practices. I have essentially been given the opportunity to be the Agile Evangelist within the team. I will bring many things to the table and we will all decide what works for us. Here is a list of things we are either currently doing, areas I'll be focusing on, or things we will be moving to very soon. Expect to see blog posts in these areas hopefully very soon and continuing as we grow.

• BDD using MSPec - ?Context Specification maybe? Future blog post to discuss this more
• User Stories Based Development
• SEO Concerns
• TeamCity - Finally!!
• Subversion - Not sold on it yet
• JQuery - Lots of it and Happy about it!

I'm very excited about the new direction and the knowledge I've already gained. I hope to keep the old blog a little more updated and provide more content in these as well as other areas related to custom dev work.

Cheers,
Kyle