I suppose if Marcus makes a post (even if it is just quiz results) then I should at least make one too. I started out with the intention of making some meaningful posts in this space, but got as far as 'woohoo I can make pizza' before events in my professional life put me into a mood for only the blackest of rants, which I didn't want to put on record.

The short version of the story is that I resigned from my job in November and as of the 18th of December am no longer employed by Raytheon Australia. There were plenty of reasons past, present and future for my decision which I won't repeat in this public space. If you want to know more feel free to IM or email me, or even better: buy me a drink :D

On the whole I don't regret my time at Raytheon. I learned a lot about software change process and about engineering processes in general (even if what I learned was how not to do things). I learned Python and developed my first multi-threaded application (which I accidentally used during development to crash a dev server when my threads began recursively creating new threads). I improved my shell scripting and Linux administration skills. I learned how to use some of Outlook Express. I worked with a mostly great (but frequently changing) team of people.

Even though I've decided not to continue down the defence path, I'm still glad that I had the job, and I hope I can use the experience to be happier and more successful in my next job. I don't know what the next job will be yet as I resigned without having one lined up, but I'm hoping to make progress on that soon :)

It's nice being a bum for the moment though.