Some Things Never Change

Some things Never change
The first week of work back of 2012 I grabbed lunch with my boss and a colleague I've known since the end of my internship that does some contract for us. It was funny - we had a very similar lunch probably two years prior after finishing a project. Oddly enough, over the course of the week a lot of the same topics and difficulties that  came up 2 years ago on that project are still topics we deal with today (AD, LDAP, DMZ's, etc... ). I mentioned to my boss that I remembered very clearly him looking at me and going "You don't seem like you're going to be here forever" at that lunch two years ago. It was kind of alarming at the time but not in a bad way (more of a "holy shit he can tell!" kind of way). His response this time around? "I didn't mean that in any sort of negative way! I wouldn't have hired you twice if I did! Just seems like you're more of an individual than the consulting path would support, not that you couldn't be successful there..."


Sharepoint, and how it started in my internship
On the note of how some things never changed... SharePoint actually started my internship. I was working on an asset that had been built on some beta version of SP that had been rolled out and handed off to a different area of the company - my job was to get the "current install" up and running in house and then make some suggestions and improvements for a Web 2.0 version. Surprisingly, SharePoint and the custom install were complicated enough and the documentation was so poor that I didn't actually get it working by the end of the summer.

Somehow now, I can't escape SharePoint (not exactly a complaint, but just hilarious that I never really want to brand myself as a "SharePoint Administrator", but I'm totally ok being one in this position). SharePoint always will be on my resume as experience but probably not as a listed skill - it's a thing I know how to do, not the thing I want to do forever and ever. This comes after a handful of internal projects that required customizing SP styling/CSS (barf, seriously, MS obscures a lot of their themeing more than is really necessary, or at least it was in SP2007) and writing some jQuery on top of SP, and over a year gathering requirements for SP at a major client. Even my internship in Healthcare involved setting up a SP site for the team (asking a really simple question week 1 showed I had more experience than most of the team) but inherited a relatively locked down site.

I really hope this is just me and not another "most women" or "most women in tech" thing
Every once in a while, when people seek me out, I get this feeling of "Oh shit what did I do". I would say of the 5 times I can remember having this feeling over the last few years, the seeker was actually looking for me to give a "Hey good job"

GIS
One of the new projects at work involves some (fairly rudimentary, apparently) GIS data - while I won't directly be doing the work, it was interesting to go "How hard is it to update Legislative districts for our CRM data" vs "How much will it cost us, or is there somewhere we can get it for free/cheap because we are a non-profit?" Brain expanding for the win!

On the Interview
I was reminded the other day of walking in for my first interview at the new gig. Getting the interview was, again, somewhat serendipitous. I'd just gotten an offer at a small consulting firm in the city for a position that paid more than my travel consulting gig but was basically the same as the new gig I had at the old company, but with the possibility of needing to spend up to two hours in a not-currently-owned car to get to potential clients (barf, I'd rather get paid to fly to a new city).  I sent a facebook message to the (now) boss because he knew me, the old gig, and the company the offer was with. We ended up having a phone call while I was in a cab to the airport to fly back to Kentucky for a bachelorette party.

He talked through the options... a) stay where you are, b) go to this new company and the pro's and cons of each. After that, option C was dropped "Come work for me at the non profit". I contacted my PM for the client gig while I was at the airport to fly in Monday night rather than Monday morning so I could go in to interview (or maybe there was a week in between the phone call and the interview, but either way, it was a short time period).

So I end up walking in to this non-profit Monday morning, towing my suitcase and my computer as I was heading to the airport right after the interview. The elevator doors open directly in to the office, and the space is really nice. It's warm and welcoming and neatly designed. Essentially, in the 2 minutes I was waiting in the lobby for the boss to come out, I had this sense of "Yes, I want to work here". And the rest is history!

Beyond the practically immediate sense of wanting to belong there, I also got a sense that everyone at work feels very familiar. I've come to realize  several of us have random connections we sorted out through Facebook, or that we hang out in the same bars, but beyond that, I think there's a sense of "kindred spirits". Maybe it's just good people working for a good cause, or a sense of community that resembles one of the University YMCA from college. Who knows.

Lots more to write about, but in the interest of blogging SOMETHING I'll hit publish now and start a draft with the rest of the topics for later, lots of things brewing in my head.