It’s never easy leaving a great team. The last three years have been full of growth for me, both mentally and professionally. In those years I have been given the chance to integrate Phing as our deployment automation tool, learn more about coffee (thanks Eric!) and begin the path of mentoring without being completely condescending. I’ve worked on projects that handled geo-spatial searching in MySQL [FYI: you want to use this UDF for distance calculations as it is order of magnitudes faster], to those that help manage church websites. Those who know me, would have asked why I chose to work at LPi given it’s religious affiliations, it’s about the code, and the chance to work on stuff that a large group of people will actually use!
I will miss the team, but by embracing the changes in our life we learn to move forward. IT is full of change anyway, staying static means certain death. Some LPi competitors are learning this the hard way, and I still look forward to seeing them either being acquired or leaving LPi’s market.
Good luck in the future and please keep in touch! I’ll be headed to Madison’s PHP conference again this year if you’re willing to head that way.
Staying static definitely leads to stagnation and a competitor will take advantage of that. LPi seems to be leading the way in part because of the great team there.
I learned a lot from you David!