Tomorrow is my last day at the ol’ salt mine, where I’ve been for the past 8 years. It’s a hell of a thing, leaving; I have more than a few complex emotions about the whole deal.
I feel like I’m leaving behind code and systems that were in better shape than when I arrived. Hard not to when you arrive to a giant pile of Sun hardware, running ancient versions of Solaris. I leave behind 100% Linux, running on commodity hardware, a change I brought to the company.
Our primary application, a horrible mess of PHP4 spaghetti when I started hacking on it, is a slightly less horrible lasagna of PHP 5.3+, and there’s a good first pass at a modern PHP app in the repo as well.
There’s more than a few things I didn’t accomplish that I set out to do. Some of them, we were simply “overtaken by events”. The business has a way of turning underneath you – it’s part of the fun. In other cases, the current business climate simply isn’t right. Austerity is the order of the day, and fewer and fewer customers were willing to spend money to make money (to name but one example).
I’m proud of some of the work I’ve done, but I won’t be sad to see PHP go (the new job is a Python shop). A couple years ago I went all-in on PHP; I even obtained a Zend certification. PHP often deserves much of the hate people throw at it, but there’s also a lot of smart, innovative people who are really trying to push the language/platform in the right direction.
I’m super-excited about the opportunities at the new place. I’m really looking forward to kicking a lot of ass for them. All the skills I bring, I honed in the salt mine.
