The First Day
Today was a great first day on the new job. I rode my bike in - which took about an hour - and arrived around 10:00. The commute is beautiful - mostly on a bike path, and mostly along a river. It's too bad I won't be doing it more (I'll likely be working from home a lot). Most of the day was spent exploring Blue Glue, source code and the sample apps. I found out that Blue Glue (which is basically a development environment installer and configurer) on Windows has gotten much better since Out-of-the-Box 2.x. Now it skips most of the Windows installers and everything is installed through OpenLogic's Swing app. It was a fun day talking about open source and how things integrate together. I'm not used to talking with folks about my open source experiences and enthusiasm - so it was a nice change.
The best part was when I received my assignment for the next couple of days: upgrade the Maven sample apps to the latest version and enhance one to include build/deployment examples. I'm also responsible for writing documentation on the sample apps for developers who use them. While I'm not a huge Maven fan, I know that some people like it and it'll be cool to create a "how to" for those folks. On the ride home, I realized that I'm really enjoying what I do right now. I'm basically developing and writing for developers. I have no "business" clients per se - most are developers: both with Spring Live and Blue Glue. The downside is that developers tend to be a pretty smart lot - and if I screw up - they'll let me know about it. Oh well, open source rocks - it's cool to be working with it full time.
The worst part of the day was coming home to over 1000 e-mails - from not checking my e-mail all day. I've got a major spam problem since about 200 of those are from mailing lists and I was only interested in 20-30 beyond that. I'm thinking of changing my e-mail address. Rather than adding more junk filters - I need to eliminate the sheer volume - it's choking both Mail.app and Outlook - and I have a 2 MB connection!