Tip of the Iceberg

Category musings
As of last Thursday, I have been with Lotus 911 for two years. After previous jobs that (no offense, former employers) already felt stale after a few months, it's been wonderful to have a job that just keeps getting better.

With the exception of a couple LotusScript buttons for the Notes client interface of Crowded Wisdom (and perhaps an agent or two elsewhere I've since forgotten about), I've been doing nothing but XPages development since the beginning of November... it occurred to me today, that's roughly a third of the time I've been in my current job, despite being the "cutting edge" technology in this industry niche. At first it was just for our own products, but literally within a week after returning from Lotusphere, I was developing XPages for our clients, and it hasn't stopped since. In fact, I'll be onsite at a client next week to start yet another mid-sized XPage project. Call me a fanboy if you like, but I'm having more fun than I ever have before working on the Domino platform, because XPages give me a slew of new capabilities that I can offer to our clients without rescinding any of what I've always loved about Domino. I can create a very basic web application that actually looks decent in a matter of minutes; in a couple days I can make it look even nicer by adding some OneUI flair; over the course of a couple weeks I can add features that, if attempting to implement in "legacy" elements, would make my brain hurt.

And the reason that I get to play with this stuff full time is that I work for a company that stays on the cutting edge, and has clients who know that we do - who, more often than not, came to us precisely because they know that we do. Sorry for the sales pitch embedded in that observation, but I just love that I'm no longer sitting in a cubicle that I've occupied for years, writing code in the same language I was writing when I first arrived, for the same version of Domino they were using when I got there, to solve the same problems that should have gone away as the business evolved... but didn't because it hasn't. But I've learned recently that I'm not good at celebrating - it's much easier to dwell on past failures and regrets, and focus on what I don't have, than to celebrate successes and blessings - so, as one effort in my attempts to improve at that, this is a public thank you to my employer for not only allowing me to do what I enjoy doing, surrounded by some of the brightest members of the Yellowsphere (no, I won't call it a bubble, it's not a bubble), but also paying me enough to keep the creditors from hunting me down. You guys rock.