Joe Rinehart

The past few months showed me that I'm simply not a good fit for the business of Broadchoice.  The combination of instability, constant changes in direction, and emotion inherent in the business side of a Bay Area startup isn't compatible with who I am and what I need to be satisfied with work.  To emphasize it, I'm not leaving for any reasons that are technical - I'd give my 1998 custom shop Stratocaster to work with Sean, Ray, Brian and our design group again.  The business and I were just not compatible.

Instead of starting Firemoss back up, I've accepted an offer to do Enterprise RIA work at my old employer, Booz Allen Hamilton.  I'll be jumping right in on a few Flex and ColdFusion projects I've been involved with before, and a good portion of my time will be spent in an R&D capacity, investigating marketable business applications of RIA.  It's a darned cool gig if you can get it.

One focus of this move is to re-center my work / life balance.  Broadchoice became too much of a priority in my life, and it's time to refocus on family and living life.  As I settle in at Booz, my non-work focuses will be family, revamping this blog (moving back to BlogCFC, actually), working to release Hoagie and MG3, and training for competitive mountain biking.

Again, I miss working with Sean, Ray, and Brian....engineering work at Broadchoice made me happy, but it wasn't enough of what I was doing.  If anyone ever gets a change to work with any of these guys, immediately take it.

This morning I published a post on the ArgumentCollection that contains a step-by-step tutorial on setting up a Groovy development within Eclipse that has TestNG (think JUnit) for testing.  As I mentioned on Twittr, I'm really excited to have a job that encourages me to blog some of my paid-time output, not just blog my side work that we happen to use in the office!

When I announced that I joined Broadchoice a few weeks ago, I mentioned a marathon job interview at their 2008 Global Developer Meetup.  What I couldn't mention at the time was that I had some very good company in the form of another interviewee:  Brian Kotek.  We both decided to join the team, but while I could immediately begin work, we couldn't announce Brian's hiring until today.  This morning, I was happy to see that the news is public in the form of Brian's announcement on his blog.

As he mentions, he and I have worked together on other projects for a good chunk of 2008, and the collaboration has been a great experience.  Brian is a fellow North Carolinian (living about 20 minutes from me), a ColdFusion and ColdSpring wizard as well as an all-around evil genius (in the best sense of the term), and I'm excited to have the opportunity to continue working with him.

Last night, Sean Corfield indicated that he's a little frustrated because he's not blogging as frequently as he'd like.  That's largely because we're working on a few projects at Broadchoice that we really can't talk about, but I can say that I've been working a little bit of overtime because the subject matter is just so darn cool.

So, while Sean's frustrated, we've got a triad of SaaS products under development that are chock full of interesting technologies keeping us busy.  Hopefully we'll be able to blog about the technology soon, maybe even on a new official Broadchoice Engineering blog.

John Whish has posted a blog entry entitled "How to get a job at Broadchoice" - apparantly we're a meme now! His blog entry is both insightful and nakedly honest, talking about some of the hurdles to be overcome when you're a lone developer without a development team or mentor.

Apparantly I work with a bunch of trendsetters...

I'm proud to announce that I am now a Systems Architect for Broadchoice, Inc. I'm a direct report to Sean Corfield, and the (impressive) list of technical coworkers includes names like Raymond Camden and Nicolas Lierman. At CFUnited 2008, Sean and Ray took a group of us out to lunch - little did I know that the three hours there would pale in comparison to the duration of the full interview, which consisted of attending the Broadchoice Global Developer Meetup '08. Ending my independent consultancy through Firemoss was a hard decision to make, but Broadchoice made an offer I couldn't refuse, offering my a position where I'll be:

1. Working with an engineering team that's second to none in the ColdFusion community
   
2. Working for a management team and board of directors including the likes of Sergio Zyman and Larry Blair
3. Designing and implementing a game-changing product in the world of marketing
4. Exploring new integrations of ColdFusion with Java and open-source Java frameworks
5. Having a ton of fun.

My initial project will be working with Nicolas to produce a behavior analytics and modelling RIA. It's going to be a challenge, as I'll have to tool the existing Transfer / ColdSpring / Model-Glue applications to record user events while simultaneously providing a high-performance service tier that will feed the (destined to be beautifully designed) RIA that Nicolas will be implementing.