Change I can achieve in

Well, this post is more of the personal variety, but it may affect future posts in one way or another (however, not like this).  In short, a season of change is upon me.

Big change #1.  I’m getting out of the consulting world for a while.  It’s been grand and I’ve learned a ton about people, business and technology.  But I felt it was time for something different.  Because of the types of consulting firms I’ve worked with the past 3 years, the one thing I haven’t liked is that I never got to work on a team long enough to really get to know the folks I was working with very well.  Seems like just when my team and I were really getting productive together, we’d all get thrown to different projects, usually with folks we hadn’t worked with before.  Obviously some of this has to do with the nature of consulting in general, but I’m sure some firms see the value in keeping teams together as much as possible than others.

Big change #2.  Like Chad, I also started a new job this week, for a great product company.  The company is small, which I really like, especially when talking about small development teams.  I’m hoping to learn a lot (drinking from the firehose this week) and be a good contributor along side the other couple developers on the team.  It’s an interesting product with some pretty unique challenges to tackle, from what I’ve seen so far.  I’ll be doing mostly ASP.NET work, with maybe a little mobile device stuff thrown in for good measure.

Big change #3.  I’m joining the world of web workers!  Yep, I’m now working from home exclusively.  This might be the biggest change for me in all of this, but I’m very much looking forward to adapting to this type of lifestyle/work environment.  I’m sure I’ll have some things to learn, specifically about how to keep things balanced, but so far it’s been enjoyable.  Not to mention, it’ll help me kick the “eating out” habit that I was stuck in during my traditional office jobs.  :O

So far I’m finding that my reliance on tools like IM, Skype and SharedView (which is pretty decent) just grew exponentially.  I’m looking forward to possibly trying out some remote pairing as soon as I get settled.

To make this post at least somewhat productive, here are a couple tools and a bonus tip that I’ve been introduced to over the past couple days that you may find useful.

• Pidgin-Encryption (for…umm…encryption)
  • Hamachi (really nice and free VPN software)</ul> Bonus Tip: I’ve been a huge Pidgin fan ever since it had that weird Gaim name.  I use it for everything.  AIM, Yahoo, GTalk, IRC, Twitter.  One tip that I learned today is how to set up Pidgin to “auto join” you to a particular IRC channel as soon as you login into Pidgin.  Here’s how to do it…
  1. Click Buddies > Add Chat
     • Choose your IRC account/server from the Account drop-down
       • Type the name of the channel you want to join
         • Give the chat an alias (I just used the channel name)
           • Click Add
             • Now find that new chat in your list of buddies, Right-Click > Auto-join
               • That’s it!</ol> So now when you fire up Pidgin, it’ll automatically join you to that room.  Most of you may already know about this, but I thought it was pretty cool.

               Anyway, until next time.  I have a lot of things to blog about in the hopper.  Hopefully I can get around to them sometime soon.  *sigh*