Going old school in the new school.

So this is kinda a 2.0. An attempt to try this blogging thing again.

I had lost my job back in Early January. After working like someone bought me at auction for well over a year, putting in hours that would make some doctors in their first year of residency baulk, I became rather jaded with programming, computers, and in general the world.

Recently I have started a new position with a health care IT company in the Detroit area. One of this companies central products involve a Content Management System(CMS) that is heavily marketed to hospitals, education centers, medical centers etc.

For those of you who are not aware a CMS is a system that allows the non-programmer administrator of a website to manage their own content on a website.

To a degree this system has various modules that organizations can purchase, request(and pay for) customizations to these modules to suit their various needs.

Coming into the health care world for the first time, and coming from primarily companies that supported the plummeting American automotive industry, I am confronted with a rather unusual concept in business for me. This company has money, it is growing, this time by more then 5 employee's in my mid sized group.

One team of this group (approx 3-4 people) are launching somewhere around 100 new websites in a 12 month period.

The complaints in this company are about layoffs, or suspended bonuses or 401k contributions, but about not having enough time to train all the new people.

It's almost unsettling.

But the thing that has me kinda going geeky is how we have to program. This is a .NET shop, nothing unusual there. But things change ALOT, often on the fly. So the project compilation is setup alot different then I have done in the past.

Frankly it made me realize I have been spoiled.

Things like intellisense, and inline compilation to immeadiatly tell me when I have boned it up have been a crutch to me in my career.

Often now, many of the changes and work I am doing right now involve opening good old fashion notepad, or its big brother and my personal fav, Notepad++ and going to work.

This really requires you know what you are doing, no intellisense, no inline api reference. Nothing to really tell you that you didn't close that div right.

This is the old school. The days of ASP 1.0-2.0. When you better know what you are doing, because you are changing a live site, and better be damn sure what you are doing.

There are opportunities to program with all the toys of the trade when new dev occurs, but this tickles my geek side.

The great thing is, I realized that I am up to the challenge and can roll with the big dogs.

-JP