With a title like that, I guess it goes without saying that things have been pretty interesting around here lately. To sum it all up, last Wednesday was my last day at Vanderbilt, I start my new job as a Sr. Developer at South Eastern Book Company tomorrow, and as for going out of the country I'll be leaving next week on my trip to Moldova. To say that the month of June has been busy would be an understatement.

New Job
Have you ever had a situation where something good just fell in your lap, then smacked you around in the face a few times before you took notice? Well, that's essentially what happened with this new job. I wasn't looking for a job, and really didn't have any intention of leaving Vanderbilt. So, when I was initially contacted about this position, I told them that I wasn't interested, but because of my ties to the Nashville ColdFusion User Group that I could probably help them find someone. (As a side note, this is a fairly common occurrence. I sometimes get contacted via the User Group about a job opening, and I'll get the job details and pass that info on to the group.) After several emails back and forth getting all of the details for the position, it started sounding more and more like something that I would be really interested in, so I told them to throw my name into the hat (after I posted the position to the User Group, of course.) And, as it turns out, I was one of the lucky 3 chosen.

Old Job
While I was only at Vanderbilt a little less than two years, I feel that my time there was well spent and really allowed me to grow in areas that will help me excel at my new position. We weren't on CF 9 yet, so I didn't get to work with any of the newer features like ORM or CF scripting. Instead, a lot of my time was spent under the hood of ColdFusion figuring out how to make an application run more efficiently. I learned a lot about how ColdFusion looks at things, and I spent a lot of time laying out application architecture and finding ways to take really old, really bad code and make things better, which is something that I really enjoy doing. Vanderbilt is an awesome institution to work for, I made some friends and had some fun, so I would have to categorize my time there as a big WIN.

My Trip
In about 10 days, I'll be leaving for the country of Moldova to go work in an orphanage for a week. This will be my first time going out of the country, and my first mission trip doing something like this, so I'm really looking forward to it. I'm not that nervous about the trip yet, but I'm sure that will change once my wife drops me off at the airport. Thankfully I'm going with a group that's been several times, so all I have to do is play follow the leader until I get things figured out.

I'm excited about this new chapter in my life, and am looking forward to seeing what the next few months have to offer. All of this comes after the sudden death of my father in April, so these last couple of months all seem to be a huge whirlwind right now. Hopefully after I get back from Moldova and settled in at the new job things will settle down a little bit, but I doubt it. :-)