Things on here have been a bit quiet lately, pretty much as a direct result of my life being anything but quiet. Tonight is the first evening since I started at Transitive that I haven’t gone out somewhere to do something.

To be fair, most of the busyness has been socialising – going out with my new workmates (a large number of whom are, in fact, old Uni pals – so more of a “How have you been?” rather than a “Getting to know you” sort of deal), seeing some other people I haven’t seen for ages because of distance and time difficulties, and choosing songs to play at Lori‘s birthday next year. So, anyway, yes; tonight I am free to lounge around and do nothing, and it’s quite a good feeling, given

New job

I know a few guys from my old company read this, so I’m going to try and write this without sounding too gloaty or self-satisfied; however, it’s hard to understate exactly how fantastic a move this has been for me. So, sorry if I start rambling or anything; I’m just a bit excited, that’s all.

Basically, the working environment at Transitive suits me down to the ground – for a start, it’s very relaxed, and the company provide free (and very good) coffee, cans of drink, doughnuts on a friday and a relaxation area with pool tables and stuff (and I can use the internet without first getting approval from my line manager *mutter*); but alongside this is a very rigorous and well-implemented engineering process which enforces peer-review and extensive testing of code. The basic upshot of this is that you have a happy bunch of engineers producing high quality, well engineered code. In addition, the projects we’re working on (although I can’t talk about them) are all really interesting, incredibly technical and, frankly, very exciting.

The guys I work with are, basically, a bunch of enormous geeks, which is great: on my first day, we had a seminar on the statistics of performance benchmarking during our lunch-hour – and everyone turned up for it; I just can’t imagine anything like that ever happening at Strangelite. The company grew out of a University project, and many of the lead engineers and technical board members are ex-lecturers and ex-students from Manchester University; as a consequence, there’s still the feeling of a University research group (with a hefty dollop of Silicon Valley tech company) about the place – albeit one with a multi-million dollar budget, formalised engineering processes and commercial clients.

Basically, I pretty much love it there, and even though I can see the work becoming pretty difficult, pretty quickly, it’s a hugely exciting company to work for, and the prospect of having a continual series of new and interesting challenges is, for me, a fantastic one – especially given the comparitive paucity of such challenges in my previous job.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 8th, 2004 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.