Goodbye for now

Well, today was my last day with RECRUITadvantage

I have been with the company for 1 year and 9 months – so it’s quite sad leaving.

I can only say it was very good experience working with them.

There are a lot of fond memories working here. I’ve made the biggest blunder in my professional life with this company – lucky it didn’t cost me my job :)

With this company I also have worked on 2 of the most difficult projects I’ve ever encountered in my working life. The first one was getting ColdFusion to talk to our partner’s web service which secured by SSL v3 – I blogged about it here – I ended up making a .NET component (with the help from our partner’s .NET developer) that acts a bridge between our ColdFusion server and our partner’s web service.

The second one was converting a very old job board module to make it work in our new interface. It was very challenging as the code is really hard to understand and untangle, plus the deadline was really tight for this project. I really thankful for jQuery, it enables me to (re)write the new module in less time and most importantly less code. I certainly learnt a lot about jQuery in this project. One hard lesson that I learnt (in hard way) is, just because your jQuery code works in Firefox – doesn’t mean it will work in IE.

That reminds of me of one of my proudest achievements with the company. It is the introduction of jQuery. I am glad my product manager is really open to new things, when I suggested to use a javascript library – he gave me permission immediately,

I’ve done a quick research on libraries and I put my bet on jQuery (although I was a protoype – scriptacolous coder beforehand) – boy, the best decision ever.

Now getting the developers to jump to jQuery bandwagon did take a little bit longer – I remember sending them emails and writing wiki entries showing how easy and short it is to write jQuery code instead of the plain Javascript. I am really happy now that at least there are few of the developers “gets it” and they’ve been using jQuery in their projects and as a result they have added magical touch in some areas in our application.

My other proud achievement is the creation a convention based framework to streamline the process in our job board implementation.

Phew, there are so many things that I went through together with the crew there. Many good memories that I will remember, made some good friendships too.

If any of you ColdFusion-ers out there looking for a CF position, don’t hesitate talk to them, you can contact me and I’ll forward your details to appropriate people.

Now I am not too sure what the future holds for me, I am thinking of taking 2 months break and doing some soul searching..

Do I still want to work with ColdFusion professionally – I know I will always do something with ColdFusion (CFML) as it’s very close to my heart. Or do I want to break into Java this time around. Do I want to stay as developer or do I want to do something else – technical writing, business analyst, data entry etc2? Where do I want to take Passionate Development

So many questions, so many alternatives, all I want to do now is to spend more time with my wife and kids who I have been kind of neglected for a while.