Going to California

This year has been a busy year for me. But not in accomplishing the goals I set out as my resolutionsmy. One big reason is the my day-job began taking over more time as we moved on a major goal.

I was until last Friday Director of Technology of WebMD’s Montreal office, nee Conceptis. Which basically meant development team lead, architect, analyst, advocate, and general tech dude. I worked with an amazing group of guys, and through the larger WebMD family met equally talented people.

The first half of this year was occupied by the launching of Montreal’s flagship site theheart.org, playing catch up with the latest design trends and best practices the rest of the ‘net. Layouts, comments, RESTful architecture. It was quite a challenge, made greater by the fact that we had to pull this off on legacy systems and a legacy code-base.

We succeeded to an extent, and I am pleased it what we accomplished in so brief a time. But as the project wrapped up, it made me realise how stagnant I had become. Apart from missing my own goals, and the continued delay of Galacticast’s return, it had become quite some time since I learned something new on the job, apart from the odd bug in JAVA or the way systems worked together.

So when an opportunity to work in LA popped up, I had to snap at it. I’ll be working at Carbon Five out of Marina Del Rey, in developing applications for a wide range of clients. The way they work, the people involved, and just the change of responsibilities has me excited about showing up to work again. And you should always feel that about your work.

For those concerned about Galacticast, don’t be. Bringing it back is still my primary personal goal. We have a new season drawn out, and having actually calculated our expenditures for making the show over two years, we know exactly making an episode costs us. I’ll be upfront; our immediate goal is to look for someone to fund it. So if you’re interested or know anyone who may be, reach out to our (himself very talented) agent, George Ruiz, or hit me if you want a preview.

So that’s it. Big unknown future ahead of me. Rebooting goals of physical fitness (environment will help), creatively (ideas I have a plenty, time to launch them), and building my data-cloud (this is the first of daily, srsly I swears).