I have been employed.  Yesterday morning I had an interview with Soleo Communications in Fairport.  I showed up at 9:30 and soon met with the CTO.  I was feeling kinda spacey at the time but squeezed in some insightful business questions for him (I’m good at that).  He talked about the company and its past, present, and future.  After forty minutes or so he passed be on to a couple other people, a manager and the company’s technical guru.  We discussed pretty much every aspect of my resume, right down to HarmoGen and my time in Germany.  The guru happened to question me on pretty much every technical part of my resume that I really don’t have much experience with (J2EE, XML, UML), but I handled them gracefully.  We chatted for an hour or so before passing me on to a couple former co-ops turned full-time employees.  I wanted to ask them exactly what they did there, because by that time I knew I had a shot at the position.  At around 11:30 I headed back home, content.  Five hours later they gave me an offer (come to think of it, every interview I’ve had with a woman has resulted in a job: go figure).  It’s only for $12.50/hr, but I knew I would be taking a pay cut from previous jobs just because it was a small company.  I had previously taken an oath to not work for another large corporation; mission accomplished.

It’s not that the atmospheres in these large companies (Paychex, Kodak) are all that undesirable, it’s just that there’s so many hoops to jump through to get anything done.  The larger the company, the less productive its employees are, for this very reason.  This is why these companies tend to hire poorer programmers.  Smaller companies need the best workers since they are more reliant on them individually.  I’m ambitious and want to make a noticable impact on the company(s) I work for.

So then:

May 27: Graduation
June 5: Begin work

In between: Hopefully a ton of hiking

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about programming languages, startups, and the current state of the software industry lately.  I’ve admitedly been kind of wading through the field in my head but realize now that in reality I’m pretty much submerged.  This is a good thing; my favorite classes at the moment both involve a lot of programming, and they keep me busy doing interesting projects.  Side note: these projects will be posted here or somewhere soon, so stay posted. 

The next project I want to do is rewrite this blog.  Right now TypePad provides all the code, layout, hosting space, everything.  I want to be able to write my own blog keeping this same URL.  Not sure if this is possible, but after finals are over I will have the time to further investigate.  The main reason for doing this is to learn Ruby, and the Rails framework as well.  Web applications (and their developers) are a hot item right now, and Ruby on Rails seem to be the best way to attack them.  At the RubyOnRails site their is a link to a demo of someone setting up a (very basic, but database-driven) blog in 15 minutes.  Very encouraging. 

So it’s week 9 and I have about two weeks left of college.  Pretty exciting.