I haven’t updated since last November, and before that I hadn’t updated since the end of the August. Thankfully, there’s a good reason for it! I’ve been amazingly busy since September with my new job as a software engineer at Callfinity. We make a suite of web-based telephony applications for businesses and telecommunication service providers, providing things like conferencing, call recording, automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), and a full blown PBX. Specifically I work on the user interface for the various applications.

Making the move from my previous company (where I was a project manager) to here was a necessary one. There reaches a time where you simply aren’t learning anything new and you need to “revitalize” your creative and competitive juices. I reached that point sometime in the middle of August. Carm had been pushing me for some time to get out because I clearly hadn’t been happy with how things had been going and I finally made a move. “Shit or get off the pot” took on a new meaning.

One of the best things that has come out of this is that I’ve gotten back to my roots as far as web development goes - I think I’ve written more code in the last 4 months than I had in the previous 4 years. Being a PM was great and all, but ultimately it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as working through problems on my own, coming up with solutions, and then having those solutions directly benefit a customer. I can’t count how many times I felt I did way more work than what was required of me as a PM, only to get slapped down as soon as one little thing went wrong. Perhaps I’ll go back to it one day, but not anytime in the near future.

And one indirect benefit of all of this is that I’ll hopefully be able to spend more time blogging on and improving this website (and others) as I gain some new chops - that is, as long as I’m not working 50-60 hour weeks like I was for a time in December. I’ve already done a couple of things here and there which I’ll let you discover on your own. If you happen to have an iPhone, hit chrisbartley.net and check out the new iPhone version of my site (all thanks to BraveNewCode’s WPTouch plugin for Wordpress). Enjoy!

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