Where have I been

I don’t think I let the masses know where I went after Uni. So here is the speel.
Towards the end of IBL last year, I got an email from Ashley at HotMagna. He said that had heard I lot about me, and was wondering if I would be would be interested in a position there. They handed over the web address and said have a poke around.
At the time, I had just been given the kick in the pants from IBM, and was interested in wasting my time on Web Development on my own under the name of Infinite Precision.

But I said what the hell, it’ll be interesting for the interviewing practice.

They gave me the 30min phone interview. Basically just asking how I tackle development in general, and a few “text book” style Java questions.
I was slightly dissapointed in some of my responses. My simple answer was that I had been doing Delphi for 4 months and C# before that so the specifics of Java had left me.

A couple of weeks later a receive an email. They want to put me through their test. Most of it was a rehash of the questions they asked over the phone, and two coding tasks.
I hadn’t done database interaction in a long time, so I wasn’t able to do that.
The other task I did. I wasn’t proud of it’s design, but it was only a small task.

They were quite intrigued at how I interpreted their instructions. We had a chat about how a design can sometimes be inhibiting if you are venturing into new territory and a couple of other things.
Get a phone call a while later that they want my skills. I wasn’t over the moon about it because I really wanted to follow my own web dev thing.

But I started.

I was placed on the Toll acount. They have a system that manages all of the scanned documents from parcels that pass through the various scanning stations. The IT isn’t that difficult to grasp, but it does take time to get a complete understanding. The hardest part is the politics. The kind of thing that can really kill a love of developing.
Funny thing. Toll stocks have almost doubled since I’ve started working there. I’d love to think that I was the cause of it

So, to prevent the brain from going insane, Dave and I are trying to get some movement in the Web Dev world. He is suffering a little in his job. Has no tangible result from the work he does. We have a few clients that we will meet. A meeting with Telstra has to be re-arranged. We want to find the cost of hosting our own server. We feel it could be a selling point to small businesses if they only have one point of contact for all their online accounts.

Last weekend I went away. Probably for longer than I should have since I have been trying to get over a cold of some sort. I don’t mind the 9-5 job, but when you leave home at about 7, get home at about 7, it leaves little room for anything but sleep.

-= Comments
1. Xavier | April 24th, 2006 at 1:07 pm

Rather than hosting your own server (or getting a dedicated one), you may be better off reselling (or having a “preferred”) hosting. Then you don’t need to manage the specifics of maintaining it and can focus on actually making web sites. You can still be the single point of contact - just refer through to the hosting company.