Thin Air

Farewell Ecuador

That's it. My sabbatical is over. Reality being what it is, it couldn't last forever, and recently I decided it was time to wrap things up in Ecuador, head back to North America, and figure out what to do next.

So much for that plan. A week later I was on my way to Boston for a job interview. A week after that I was frantically packing. I'm now camped out on the floor of my new and very empty apartment in Lowell, Massachusetts. I've just started a new job at Quallaby, working on the back end to PROVISO.

Now that I've had a little time to get my bearings, all I can say is wow. The scale of this project is amazing, and the quality of the code and the development processes it entails is impressive. I can tell I'm going to learn a lot here and have a lot of fun in the process.

One of things that has been most interesting so far is using VisualWorks for actual work instead of just poking around. I'm constantly noticing little details of the interface and development tools - where they're the similar to Squeak, where they're different. I've reached two main conclusions so far: (1) The VW tools are very good, and (2) Squeak holds its own much better than I thought it would.

All in all, I've very happy to be where I am, and doing what I'm doing. It's a chance to learn from some very skilled Smalltalkers and very difficult problems.

I'm gonna miss Ecuador though.

Posted in ecuador