This Monday, I started my new job at a web & software developing company.
Most of the time, the first week on a new job is very tough – everything is unfamilar, you don’t know everybody and everything seems strange. I know that from the time when I started another job in 1996 in a Controlling departement (something very different, business stuff). There was a lot of frustration in those days, but not this time. I could describe my feelings best to simply call it “excited”.
However, it’s still tough, but not because of the job itself, but for the fact that the company resides about 60 kilometers from my hometown (that are 120 km/day, 600 km/week). Where I live, weather is often very bad in winter, roads are slippery, much wind, much snow and most of the time I have to drive in the dark (just the last few minutes before I arrive in the morning it’s lightening up). It’s sometimes quite dangerous and requires careful driving, but I hope that these problems get solved – partly by nature (it will soon light up earlier and get dark later and winter will hopefully end some day), partly maybe by an accommodation near the company.
The job is great, because it deals mostly with things that I’m familiar with, but still offers great opportunities to learn new things. On Thursday I received my first productive project – a web application written in PHP using Smarty (nothing new to me, since db4free.net is built up the same way). But one thing is a “first time” for me – it’s my first project with PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, as PostgreSQL is the primary RDBMS used in this company and MySQL only the secondary (but I hope that I can still do some work on MySQL, too ;-)).
Of course I would have liked to mainly work with MySQL as this gave me a chance to bring a lot of excellent skills into my job (although most of my MySQL skills can also be used for PostgreSQL), but every medal with a bad side does also have one with a good side – I will have to also learn PostgreSQL very well and will get a wider perspective of RDBMS in general. More about that in (a) separate article(s).
I hope that I will get the chance to use and learn other techniques and programming languages as well. Primarily I hope that I will be able to use Java and I would very much like it if I get the chance to learn C/C++ to achieve a professional level as well, as my current skills of C/C++ are very basic. But I’m confident that they won’t disallow me to use things that I’d like to use, so this will probably be a great chance to become a professional developer for many languages and techniques.
You will certainly read more about that!