The Attempt

How long...
Yes, it has been quite awhile since I've posted. Somewhere in the vicinity of January I turned my focus hard on my career and analyzed what I wanted for my immediate and long term future. I found that (1) I liked the projects I've been working on, despite all the stresses involved, and (2) that I really thought that I'd be happiest with a 'regular' developer's job.

Sometimes I can be downright lazy, but when I do put my mind to something I can really attack things. Well, I put my mind to making the change...

One of the biggest monkeys on my back after taking a position in my current group is that I almost didn't get the position on the account of my assessed development skills by the director of development. I've always felt I had the capacity, but I didn't have much opportunity for doing much coding until coming into this group- and there would undoubtedly be concerns about my lack of, um, 'seasoning'. So I've had a fair amount of paranoia about my skills over the past two years.

I buckled down as hard as I could and made it as clear as possible that I wanted to move from SDE/T to SDE (Software Development Engineer [in Test]). I got an offer around March to become _the_ Setup and Build dev for the suite. Hmm... well, I'd never done anything related to either, but I felt it was my best opportunity and therefore I took the position.

Did I mention that I knew nothing? And man alive are these areas huge. As a first step I had to put together a build system (in MSBuild if you're curious) that would build managed and unmanaged projects that share some code. That includes command line and VS based builds for individual developers as well as a daily build system that does all of the fun stuff like localizing and distributing bits around, etc., etc. I did have a good base in one of the apps to work from- but a LOT of work needed to be done to make it work in a generic way for the entire suite.

I think I pretty much mastered the build, but the next task was even more frightening--Setup. Ugh- I lived in fear of this as the potential for screwing up is much greater. The Windows Installer isn't particularly easy to grok--I really feared that I wouldn't understand enough of it to feel comfortable putting a number of installers out in several different languages (at least by the time the first binaries are RTMed).

Last week I hit a big milestone in getting my installer code reviewed by 'the' people that know setup. I came up smelling like roses and I can't begin to tell you what a difference that makes in my stress level. Oh, I still have a TON of stuff to do, but now I have a level of confidence that is *so* much higher.

So there it is. Probably not that interesting, but the bottom line is that I just might stick a thought or two up here a bit more often. :) If I've been inattentive, I apologize.

Current Mood: accomplished

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