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jay

Posts: 1696

Posted on: 2012-02-18 04:45:34.000

Back in September I finally found a better job. I'm working for Benefitfocus as a Senior Software Engineer on their rapid app development platform (which is basically ASP.NET made easy for quick app development). It has been an absolute blast. For the first time in my entire career, I have a job that I love. It's not the perfect place to work but it is a great place to work. They like to pretend that they are some sort of startup despite the fact they've been around for 10 years - so there are aspects of that kind of culture floating around. In addition the company is absolutely obsessed with Apple and Apple products. So as a result I have a company issued Macbook Pro to do my work on. I'm still trying to get friendly with the right people so I can replace my 19" Acer LCD monitor with an Apple cinema display. One can only hope... :) My wife Annette is getting ready to graduate from nursing school at the end of March... so our economic situation is likely going to improve sometime this year. Anyway life is good. It doesn't get too much better than this from my perspective!

jay

Posts: 1696

Posted on: 2012-02-18 04:46:22.000

Whoops I appear to have clicked "new post" instead of "reply". Oh well. Enjoy the new thread fellow OSYers!

jay

Posts: 1696

Posted on: 2012-02-18 04:59:38.000

Back on a technical front, I have finally switched to Linux at home for full time use. The more I heard about Windows 8, the less I wanted to participate. My primary problem with switching was that none of the canned distros seemed to cut it on the laptop I used. There was always some deal breaking issue. That’s when I decided to man up and take Arch Linux for a spin and I haven’t looked back since. Somewhere along the way I bought an SSD for my laptop and that was easily one of the best upgrades I have ever done. It really does make a world of difference...! I’m still running Windows Server 2008 R2 on my home server though (with a license acquired via the MS Action Pack I pay for each year). In addition of course there is my work issued Macbook Pro. To develop .NET code on it, I fire up a Windows 7 virtual machine. That pretty much leaves in a position where I use each of three major desktop OSes day in and day out. It’s actually been pretty interesting to be able to compare and contrast between the three directly without nostalgia getting in the way. For instance of the three, the Mac has the worst implementation of Bluetooth (keep in mind this is Snow Leopard) whereas Linux seems to have the best. Of the three Linux boots and is ready to roll the quickest (note: that was prior to the SSD upgrade) whereas the Mac is the slowest to resume from hibernation and Windows is the slowest to get ready on a cold boot.

Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9348

Posted on: 2012-02-22 13:44:55.000

That's pretty cool, and sort of mirrors a lot of what makes my job so much fun. Our company has been around for more than ten years but it still fosters a "startup" mentality at times, so for example when I needed a Linux server I just appropriated an old computer and put it under my desk, and started developing on it.

Instead of getting upset at what I did, the company made getting new dev servers even easier, first via virtual servers and then from Amazon EC2. So now anybody can make their own server and start developing the next great awesome product on it. It's really cool!