My Job
As you may have noticed, my blogging has become a bit less consistent in both quantity and quality. Although quality probably wasn't one of it's strong points in the first place! Anyhow, what follows might explain the situation…
I generally don't blog about my professional life much largely to avoid any potential hassles. I don't recall if I mentioned it or not, but back in November I changed jobs. I was very happy with my job at ChoiceOne and was not even looking for a new job. But along came an unsolicited opportunity that proved to be an offer that was "too good to pass up". And I have to say in hindsight it was a very good decision on my part to pursue it.
My job at Synacor is wonderful, but it's kind of hard to explain it all. I was initially hired as a Code Review Engineer. My primary function is to review the work that others do and make sure they aren't doing dangerous or computationally expensive things in their code. In short, their code must meet certain standards. Documenting these standards based on existing guidelines they had and industry standard best practices is also my job. I am the gatekeeper. If you want your code added to the the project it has to be approved by me before you can commit it to the version control system. When I started I was to spend 3 months working with the Platform Development group who develop new features for our product and then 3 months with the Client Deployment group who do customization to meet each customers needs. After that I would begin to do some code reviews. But due to the our rapid growth, it hasn't quite worked out that way. Basically I spent about 6 weeks —including a week off with the Platform Development group and then started doing some code reviews. Within about a week of that I was then doing virtually all code reviews!
So I was chugging along doing "CR" when in early February the Technology Department underwent a minor restructuring. For me that meant a change in my role/additional responsibility —I was made a manager of initially, "Development Operations" and later called "a department to be named later" when my boss comes up with a better name for it. So in addition I now am responsible for bug fixes in our existing live product. It's a very small department consisting of me and Tony a very good QA Engineer who does the bug fixing. Additional people will be added as we identify what other responsibilities will be under my group and the workload increases.
At the time of my accent to a management role I was also informed that I would be becoming the backup to the Release Manager. Cool. Fast forward to last week when due to multiple priorities and the Release Engineer's unavailability, Kevin was informed he would be doing an "rsync" release the next day. Okay. With a good deal of assistance this baptism by fire went off without a hitch and I've since done a couple more with a major one coming up next week.
Although it can be somewhat hectic at times, anyone who knows me or has read my resume should realize it is really nice to be working for a wildly successful company for a change. After working for a number of failing entities it's quite refreshing. Thus my previous casual surfing at lunchtime and doing some blogging has begun to be overrun by my work demands. But that's okay because I love this job.