I had a lot of decisions to make. The first big decision was whether I was going to work full time remote again. There are a lot of perks, but there are downsides too. I felt lonely, isolated, disconnected. My wife didn’t understand what I did all day. I had no coworkers I could get drinks with, or swap horror stories with over lunch. And with two kids in the house, it has become quite noisy, and I find myself getting frustrated when our youngest has a bad day and spends it crying. And it can be stressful on a marriage to be around each other 24/7. Nothing ever changes. Little things start to become big things.
I decided that for general health, I would be looking for a job with a flexible work schedule. A few days at home, a few days in the office. Once I narrowed down what type of arrangement I wanted, then it was on to the culture. This time around I have enough experience that I felt comfortable donning the title of a senior software developer. I’ve seen enough good and bad that I can tell the differences between them.
Next was the work culture. Did I want another big company with more people than I could ever memorize? A startup struggling to become solvent? Something in between? The size of the company dictates the culture to some extent. The bank culture was slow, fearful, and inefficient. I wanted to get my hands dirty, but I wasn’t ready for 80 hour work weeks in a startup trying to get off the ground. I wanted something smaller, but established. And with a laid back culture. I didn’t want to wear a suit everyday, and I’d like the freedom to not be stuck in a cubicle.
I settled on a fun looking company called Influence Health (formerly BrightWhistle) in Midtown, Atlanta. They are right next to Piedmont Park, and its quite a drive to get here from Johns Creek. But with flexible hours, I miss the rush hour madness, and with 3 days at home, I’m not sitting in the car that often. Though, it is fun to sit in the Mazda RX-8!
The first day was a 9:30 (worst possible time due to traffic) orientation. Then it was on to unpacking my equipment while I met the team, and then I spent the rest of the day juggling orientation tasks and setting up my new laptop the way that I like it.
I decided to use Git to manage my dot files as I’ve read about a few other developers doing. You can see my progress here: https://github.com/bsimpson/.vim
I like the incremental approach, and I’ve expanded it a bit to make it super easy.
The first difficult task (outside of basic environment setup like Rbenv, Ruby, MySQL, Sphinx, etc) was the bundling of gems. This led to quite a few dependencies that couldn’t install because it couldn’t find the native libraries. This was a hit and miss adventure, but I’m reaching the end and I’ve taken notes. I’ve asked if there is a developer wiki somewhere to keep all of this painful learning. Maybe I will push to implement one if I can get some support behind the idea.
The laptop was imaged, but it provides enough freedom to configure however I would like. They use Microsoft Office, which isn’t great, but the Office365 web client has superior searching than its desktop counterpart Outlook so I guess I will just stick with that. They use Slack for communications, and the Mac app makes juggling all of my accounts very simple.
Overall I’m pleased with the team, the culture, and the equipment they have provided to me. I feel rested, focused, and ready to tackle this new job head on. Its been strange to sit in an office with other people after four years of remote work, but I’m adjusting. My voice is worn out, since I never typically speak at home.
Anyway, stay tuned for the next episodic blog post of my adventures in Midtown!
Zone of Mr. Frosti 
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