New Beginnings

In the Orthodox Church, September 1 is the beginning of the liturgical year. From what I understand, this is a carry-over from the Jewish calendar which also begins around this time, and, at one time, September 1 was also the civil new year in Orthodox countries.

When I first learned about this, I thought it was very appropriate. Perhaps this is because I spent the majority of my life so far on a school calendar, in which the new school year also occurs in autumn, but this season just seems to have a “new beginning” feeling, in a way that January 1 just doesn’t. Honestly, who decided that the “new year” should occur in the dead of winter, anyway?

It seems fitting, then, that there have been a number of new beginnings in my life lately. Most obviously, to those reading this, I am beginning a new blog. I had decided a while back that I would like to have my own domain name, but only just now got around to registering it. My plan was (and still is, ultimately) to host my personal site on a server at home that I maintain myself, but I still have some setup and configuration to do, and I got tired of waiting, so I decided to continue my account with DreamHost (the hosting provider I was using for Kristen and my wedding website) and host this site there for a while. I hope that, along with the new domain, I will be able to form a new blogging habit to actually keep this site interesting. As for what I plan to do with my old blog, I’m thinking I will see if I can import those posts here, but keep them in some sort of seperate archive. We’ll see what comes of that.

The next “new beginning” to mention is that I am starting a new job on Monday. For the past 3 years, I worked at a company called DSS, Inc. writing medical record software in an old language called MUMPS. It was my first job out of college, and I really enjoyed working there. However, as someone whose focus in college was Object Oriented Programming, I was starting to get bored with just doing MUMPS. I did have some Perl, PHP, and Javascript work on a different project, but there was very little activity going on with that. I also had begun considering the fact that I still have a full career ahead of me, and I really needed to be preparing myself to be more marketable as an employee in the future, and, from what I understand, there is not a very big market for MUMPS programmers.

At first, my plan was to start doing some extra contract work on the side, both to get professional experience in more marketable languages as well as to bring in a little extra income. After a while, however, I began considering whether it would be better to just get a new job. I mentioned this to a friend of mine, Stephen, who works at a company that develops software in C#. As it turned out, his company had just lost a developer, and was looking to replace him. I updated my resume and sent it to him. I later happened to mention this to another friend of mine, Brandy, who said she wished she had known I was looking, because her company had just hired someone. The next day, she came back and said that her company actually had another position open, and if I was interested to send my resume to her as well. Brandy’s boss contacted me the next day (if I remember correctly) for a phone interview. We then set up an appointment for me to come in for a face-to-face interview.

The next day after the interview, I was offered the job, and, after considering for a few hours, I decided to accept it. Fortunately, the day I turned in my resignation at DSS happened to be the same day that my boss was interviewing someone to replace another developer who had just left. He was hired and assigned to my project instead, and I had two weeks to help him become familiar with the code. My last day at DSS was the 11th, and I decided to take a week off between jobs to relax.

And so, next Monday, the 22nd, I will start my new job at Yye Software, a small software consulting company. I will be working with Visual Studio .NET languages, particularly Visual C++ and C#. I’m going to miss working at DSS, but at the same time, I am excited to start this new venture.

Kristen will also be starting a new job on Monday. She will be working at a company called AMEC transcribing designs into CAD software. She found this job through the sister of a family friend.

As you can probably tell, there is a lot that has been going on. Hopefully, with all of these changes happening, I will still have time to sit on our front porch and enjoy the cool autumn air and the colors of the leaves as they begin to turn, as the summer comes to an end, and a new season begins.