New job with bivio and giving thanks for blogs
Many thanks to Chris Winters for mentioning bivio in a post last December. It was hard to ignore this quote:
Superhero Rob Nagler presented his company's XP practices to a college class last year and has the slides online. (If I lived in Boulder bivio would be my dream company to work for.).
Thanks to Chris, I was paying extra attention when I met Rob at frameworks-boulder a few months back. After several interviews, bivio offered me a job last week. I'm pretty excited about it. First I need to put some finishing touches on my current project and see it into production. In the meantime I'll be dusting off my collection of perl books.
I started blogging after I was laid off from PlanetCAD. Fourteen months later there's clear professional benefits even if I'm not on the A-list. I'm convinced my blog helped me land the current contract with Microcomputer Training Specialists and the City and County of Denver. John is a blogger too. He no doubt appreciated getting a deeper glimpse into my interests and character. During my interview process, Rob mentioned that there was some good stuff on my blog.
It's not that my blog got me hired for either of these jobs. But it does give prospective clients or employers a lot more material on which to base their decisions. They can get a much better sense of how I'll fit in with their team.
A fun anecdote from the interview process. Rob never asked me for my resume. I pair programmed with him for several hours and learned some new tricks immediately. I had more traditional interviews with several other people on the team. When he sent me the offer letter it had my old address on it. "How'd he get that?" I wondered. Then I realized that I hadn't updated my resume since January and Sarah and I moved in July. It more or less worked exactly like it should. I didn't have to tell Rob where to find my resume. He found my contact info there on his own. If I'd been keeping my resume up-to-date he would have gotten the correct contact info. :-)