So, after a long-winded upheaval back to the Midlands from London after all the problems surrounding my accomodation (and somewhat unhappiness at Imperial College London for the way my project was handled and subsequently cancelled) I ended up working for The Open University. I’d been interested in the institution for a while, and nearly landed a job doing ColdFusion development there instead of going to London in the first place!
I’m nearly half-way through my contract now, as it’s only cover for a secondment, but bar the somewhat scary slience that seems to prevail in our cluster the job is actually quite a refreshing change. Project management and processes here are well executed, workload and expectations are reasonable, professional development opportunities are rife (and I’ve taken plenty advantage of that) which is very much different to other places I’ve worked. It’s not all rainbows as with any job granted, but I’m quite content for the time being.
Doing Flash development (which I’m trying to start blogging about, as opposed to doing none for PHP) has helped in a few ways, mostly as my ECMAScript was pretty poor beforehand due to my lack of experience with JavaScript but also due to not having worked with events for a very long time… since inbuilt events in Visual Basic 6! Getting my head around how everything worked took a little while, but familiarity with Adobe Creative Suite, plus great training from Gareth Shapiro and of course Essential ActionScript 3.0 means I should be half-decent at least by the time I return to normal web application development… or at least I hope so…