One month on the new job

I've been working at Loftware now for approximately one month and I thought I'd post an update on my progress there.

The company is small, but growing. There are currently about 60 people including sales, marketing and the other supporting departments that make up a self-contained software development house. In this respect, it reminds me of Trinzic and Edge - both small software companies that I've worked for in Portsmouth that were bought-out by large corporations. (Platinum and Lotus/IBM, respectively.)

The Loftware culture is very much to my liking. It's a community of like-minded people working toward a common end. And because it's small, there is no room for slackers. The engineers all seem to have a lot on-the-ball. Everyone contributes and, as far as I can tell, there are no monster egos, no one is unapproachable and, people seem willing to help each other when necessary.

Management appears to have a firm grasp of the projects, problems, schedules and all of the details that make up a development effort. Because the owners of the company are right there every day making decisions and guiding the product development, they are very much aware of the challenges, efforts and contributions of each individual. I contrast this with IBM where the decision makers were isolated and had no sense as to the amount of work an individual did or did not do. Even local management was so out-of-touch that some developers would get completely overwhelmed with work while others had little to do.

I'm enjoying working with C#. There are many similarities to Java in the syntax and its object-oriented nature. It is, however, more advanced and offers some new and interesting approaches to common development problems. And, in contrast to Java, the development sandbox is much more self-contained. It is strictly a Windows environment. Thus there are fewer configuration issues, deployment complexities, multi-platform problems, etc.

To sum up, I'm thrilled to be at the new place. I like the people, I'm sufficiently challenged, the technology is very cool and the culture agrees with me. God willing, I'll be here for quite a-while.