Continuing my tradition for aggressive career moves, I recently acquired a shiny new job. While it can be hard to start working with a bunch of people you don’t know on unfamiliar projects and with foreign processes, at least my new desk was only on the other side of the building.
In October, I started working on the “Chrome” team at NextPage, and in spite of working for the same company, it really has been a fairly drastic change.
Chrome is sort of a product name, a team name, and a corporate division. It’s not the real name of the product we’re working on, but marketing hasn’t been able to come up with a name that’s any better yet, so our prerelease versions have all shipped with a noncommittal “Project Chrome” splash screen.
In its current form, Chrome is a light-weight content management system for teams that collaborate on documents. It provides a way to help ensure everybody on the team has the latest versions of the documents, and keeps a history of previous versions.
My particular area of work involves “application integration”. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, think about pounding square pegs into round holes… in the dark. When the product does strange and wonderful things, I’m frequently the one who gets visits from the Quality Assurance team who kindly point out that those particular instances of strange and wonderful are not completely in line with specifications. I then embark on some learning exercises, because the author of most of the code has moved on to bigger and better things. Not that I blame him — its hard getting those pegs in, after all.
Shortly after I joined the team, it was dubbed the “AI Team“. I think this might be a ploy to lure hapless engineers into to joining, in hopes of doing some really cool Artificial Intelligence work.
So while the work at times is not ideal, the people on the team are bright, friendly and energetic. In fact, some of them could even be reading this now if they happen to follow the link from my work web site. Not that I would attempt flattery or anything…. Because they really are a great group.
Another plus is that our investors and potential customers are pretty excited about the product, and they have given, and may give us money to build it, respectively. After moving from my previous job in the Publishing Applications Group, I also realized that the NextPage executive echelon tend to be focusing their interest and loving attention more toward the Chrome side of the building.
So Chrome, in addition to motivating ironic Smithy article titles, is being a challenging change with good potential. Now if I can just find a good lamp and a bigger hammer.