Making the Leap

Today marks my last day at Higher Logic, and with it marks a year+ of working to build up the software infrastructure from startup to sustainable.

I’ve really enjoyed my time here; a year ago I had no knowledge of AWS, and a developer’s knowledge of SQL Server. I had only shipped one JavaScript project, and was still uncomfortable just going out and ‘doing’ on my own.

That year has also included:

• Marking one year as a DBA; and 2 years as a Full Stack Developer.
• migrating 500 databases from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2014
• Planning and implementing a Disaster Recovery solution for 500 databases;
• Shipping Higher Logic’s Widgets platform
• My first, second, and third pull requests into open source projects
• writing fixes for Video.JS playlist plugin
• digging deep on SQL Server improvements; query optimization and production troubleshooting
• Making lots of mistakes along the way
• Refactoring and putting in unit tests (I repeat myself) to allow improvements to infrastructural code including a hand-rolled ORM (not by me)
• Giving several talks; including a talk at the HUG Super Forum on the new Widgets Platform and a talk to developers on Git
• Building tools to provision SQL Server instances on AWS and to set up those instances according to the Brent Ozar SQL Server Setup Checklist
• And even more mistakes and fixing of those mistakes; including two (brief) production outages

I’ve enjoyed my time in the .NET world; but I’m anxious to get back into other technologies, and to immerse myself in the JavaScript world. Time to leave the kiddie pool.

As to what I’m doing next? I’ll give two hints:

• See the title
• My career progression has been: Large Corporate -> Defense Contracting -> Medium Sized Business -> Small business that just left startup mode -> ?