The title of this post tells a little of the story, but certainly not all.
I’ve been at “a large, international energy company” (I’ll call it “LINECO” for short) in Houston for a year now, working on their TFS implementation. You’ve seen the posts sharing some of the key learnings from that position. It’s been a good run and a great learning experience. The TFS implementation that I’m leaving behind has over 100 Team Projects and about 80 build scripts. It is, I have no doubt, one of the largest implementations (if not the largest) in Houston, if not Texas by sheer number of Team Projects. Several more groups are coming on line in the next few months; each will have their own Project Collection and may require scaling out to multiple app-tiers. I can’t say that I want to leave … but sometimes things come up that are just too good to turn down.
And that’s what Logica offered. Yes, the money is good but it’s not everything and while I won’t complain, it’s not what has me so excited about this. What really drew me is the opportunity to work on cutting-edge technology. I’ll be leading a team of developers building a set of components around StreamInsight, a new technology from Microsoft for complex-event processing applications. Think analyzing real-time data streams. Well, to be technical, near-real-time streams as you can’t get away from the physics of latency – at least until we learn how to use quantum coupling for truly instantaneous communications. The potential applications of this technology range across a wide variety of industries – oil and gas, utilities, manufacturing, financial and more. I’ll also be working with an old friend and colleague – and one of the very best developers that I know. I won’t name this person at this time as I’m not sure that he’s turned his notice in to his current employer but he has accepted the offer.
While I am saddened to leave LINECO and the TFS implementation there – I’ve put a lot of blood, sweat and (sometimes) tears into it and I’m proud of the what I accomplished – and I leave behind some really great people, this is one of those opportunities that only comes along very rarely. It’s new, cool, ground-breaking stuff. We’ll be working on a technology where we’ll be paving the way and, often, I’m sure, learning things the hard way. It’s going to be a challenge. It may involve a great deal of ranting and frustration – but that only makes it sweeter when you accomplish that breakthrough. I have a feeling that there will be time spent in Reflector and ILDASM. Lots of scalability and load testing. I start on Monday morning.
Oh … and if you are interested … we have open positions on the team. Before you take the leap … remember … this is bleeding-edge stuff. And there will likely be some bleeding. It promises to be a very fluid environment. But … it will be cool if you’re a geeky type that gets into that (like me). If you aren’t up for that, there are other positions. But … if you are up for that … I hope to hear from you! The aforementioned friend and colleague was my first recruit.
(And yes, before you ask, I’m planning on running it on TFS, complete with build, work items, unit testing and perhaps even lab management.)