The Blog

Apr 14, 2009

First Year At Highwinds 

by Maxim Porges @ 8:15 PM | Link | Feedback (1)

I can't believe it's been a year already. I'm told that the calendar doesn't lie.

And what a year it has been. 2008 was a lot of figuring out how to bend Flex further to my will, lots of bug fixing and feature development for StrikeTracker 1.x, and staffing up my team. 2009 has been a lot of ground-up software development on StrikeTracker 2.x, lots of bending Java/Spring/Hibernate/BlazeDS to my will, and a ton of much harder (and infinitely more enjoyable) work than 2008 had to offer. I wouldn't take any of it back, besides having to lay Mario off, which was the hardest thing I've had to do in my career.

That being said, I have no regrets for joining Highwinds - quite the opposite, in fact. Not only do I love what I'm doing, but I got my life/work balance back and was able to get engaged (wedding's in two weeks!) and almost finish an open source project in my free time.

I am a lucky, lucky bastard. I wake up every day stoked to come to work. After a full day of creating bugs for Russ and Brian to fix and managing the team badly, I often find myself driving home astonished that I can get paid to do something I enjoy so much with people I respect so thoroughly. Ever since I discovered programming in college, I've wanted to work with people who get it in a place with zero politics, zero bullshit, and the pure intent to write line after line of ass-kicking, money-making software. I've been given the opportunity to do so and I count myself undeservedly lucky for it every day.

So, thanks again to Chris and Josh for seeing past my flaws and letting me join the company, and to Brian and Russ for putting up with me and being an awesome team. The first year was great; I hope I can do you guys proud in 2009 and beyond.