Moved to development
Last Monday I was officially moved to the development team within Pyxis Mobile for the remainder of my coop period. They have me doing some research and proof of concept work right now for some new products that will be available in the near future. I couldn’t be more grateful for the switch, it will be a real resume booster.
In other news, the major implementation that I handled from configuration to integration and deployment at AGF in Canada went into production with mWholesaler on May 5th, 2005. There’s plenty of press that made it out there, too. I guess the marketing department has some real good newswire feed sources, or something. Google is here to make a big record of the press release for the implementation I did the majority of the implementation and integration work on while I was on PSG. How many other 20 year olds can say they implemented a mobile CRM solution for a top Canadian financial firm?
The development team culture, while only perhaps 10-15 paces from my old desk, seems worlds apart from PSG. It’s incredible how stressful it can be to keep customers happy on the professional services group. I was doing all kinds of multitasking, calling, emailing, configuring, troubleshooting, integrating, data mapping, all at the same time, all day. I still had a blast working on that team, though, they’re all great guys, and funny too. But there are many other cool things about the company that really do reflect on my hapiness there, and also the award it just recently won, “Best Places to Work in Boston, 2005″. So anyways, the development team seems like a little bit more laid back atmosphere. But it’s probably only temporary, as we’re currently at the beginning of a new version development cycle. Some side projects and proof of concept projects seem to be the name of the game for the next week or two. It could probably be just as stressful as PSG in a month or two on the development team, in time for the next release.
They happen to like me enough that they offerred to have me work full time through the summer on the quality assurance team. I glady took up the offer, since I really didn’t look forward to working landscaping stuff again this summer. My back is slowly getting better by the day, and I don’t even need to take the large amount of ibuprofen the doctor once told me I should take daily anymore. Most days I get by with none at all, but others I wake up having slept in the wrong position, sore as hell. I’d really like to be able to practice wrestling again by next winter, or even this summer. I miss it too damn much, but the thought of reinjuring and setting back any healing it’s gone through scares me away from the mat still. In the meantime, I still have masswrestling to mess with.
I’m considering developing a piece of software to compete with The Wrestling Tourney. While it may have a solid userbase, from what I hear from some coaches is that the writer of the software isn’t very open to adding new functionality to it. I think I could develop a solid application in a pretty short amount of time, perhaps in C# using visual studio, and a mysql database as a storage piece for tournament data. It would save me quite alot of work to store tournament information in a database, and would allow for quick and easy reports to be generated that could offer some advantages over the current standard software. Problem with this is that I would not have time to support users of the software very much. I could probably charge for support, though, to make it worth my time. Red Hat and many other open source projects survive on this business model. And besides, I wouldn’t be doing it for major profits unless I had full time to work on it. Anyway, it’s a lofty idea, and I’d have to do an independent study to work on it or do it as my own coop position in order to devote any kind of serious effort into it.
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