On the rails.

After my last post, I started working on a research paper, but due to this new work, and pending further philosophical study, it's on hold. I thought it was therefore prudent, for myself, to describe my current state as I'm likely not going to be posting anything substantial until I eventually complete my paper.

Recently, my company decided to go through some changes. While the corporate machinations are restricted, what I can say is that it has resulted in a lot of teams taking stock of their assets. One of these assets is a business critical internal website that pulls a bunch of business logic, and analysis/technical tools into a single service for convenience. It's been with us for almost a decade, and has come a long way from a bundle of scripts, but a decision was made that resources could no longer be justified to maintain it (it's considerably more complicated than it sounds), and that we would be losing the website.

Needless to say, this caused a lot of negative sentiment towards management, who were seemingly out of touch with how widely this service is used. Fortunately, I'm someone who loves finding opportunity in things no-one else wants to do, because to be needed is one of my biggest motivators; if I feel like the work I'm doing is important, I can't be stopped. So, in one of my regular meetings with management, I expressed the concerns of the teams, that losing this service without a replacement would be severely detrimental to a lot of the company's workflow, after which I presented the solution of me maintaining the service. A week or so went by, and I got a response. It was on, and the process of handoff was underway.

This means that I'm currently learning Rails, with no prior Ruby knowledge, and I'm going hard. Almost all my time is dedicated to preparing, and I'm truly in my element, having an absolute blast. The framework is great, I'm under an excellent amount of pressure, and I have about two months to become proficient enough to maintain a codebase built up over 8 years. It's been a while since I've been so passionate about something; I'm becoming a better engineer, and adding value to the company I love!

I've loved my job for 7 years, but right now I'm in the good times. I'll look back on this year as a defining moment.

<%= Think differently %>