I’ve moved on from a job cowboy coding (read: shoot from the hip, work alone) ASP.NET websites to a job working at an anti-spam software company using Ruby on Rails, Perl, and sendmail under an agile/eXtreme Programming methodology. It’s heavenly bliss! Definitely worth the hour drive to Ann Arbor each day.

I’m finding that I’m much more productive working with a programming partner. Something about working side by side really spurs me on. When you work with people with open minds (and have an open mind) it’s a continuous learning and improvement process. It also minimizes the stupid mistakes that slow you down as you have another pair of eyes on the situation. Not only do I learn new techniques and ideas from others, but it also helps me to coalesce ideas that I know intuitively, but gain a better understanding by having to explain them.

Working with Ruby on Rails is also a joy. It’s great to be able to whip out features in a matter of hours and spend more time on testing and polishing. Perl, well, it’s no Ruby. It’s definitely better than C, but given the choice, I’d go for Ruby.

Ditching Windows has improved my life. I think my blood pressure has gone down. My workstation runs Fedora. Now I don’t have to worry about antivirus software causing my user interface to crash. It’s no Mac OS, but any sort of UNIX works for me.

I’ve also enjoyed the company pool table and the coolness that is Ann Arbor!