I can’t believe it’s already been six months since I joined the engineering crew at Site5. I’ve been having a blast!

Looking at my GitHub profile, it’s pretty obvious to me how much I’ve grown these past 6 months. I’ve developed and released three rubygems used in other Site5 projects (hamburglar, snuggie, and fanny_pack). I’ve helped the original developers of a few other Site5 gems (solusvm, moo_moo, lumberg, and squall). I’ve helped with some proprietary projects. I’m also happy to say I’m helping with one engineer’s transition from PHP to Ruby :)

Along the way I’ve learned the value of BDD and tests in projects. I’ve had a chance to play with Node.js and coffeescript on our company sponsored hackdays. I’ve finally had a chance to get to know Rails 3. In fact, I’m co-developing one of Site5’s first Rails 3 projects, which will likely turn out to be one of it’s largest applications. I live for this stuff, so this has been awesome fun for me.

The first day I started working for Site5, I decided to switch my editor to MacVim from Textmate. I’d been playing with MacVim on and off for a few months, but something always brought me back to TextMate. After six months with MacVim, I can say it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made as far as my development environment goes. I won’t get into all the details in this post, but I’ll note that I’m much faster with writing and editing code than I ever was in TextMate.

Aside from the actual code and tools, working with a team of engineers using the same tools and languages as me been an amazing experience. Being able to bounce ideas off of someone else is invaluable.

I’m learning a ton of new things all the time, and constantly able to practice and perfect the things I use daily. I decided to join Site5 because I thought it would be a great environment to learn and build great software - if this is what the first six months has been like, I can’t wait to see what the next year or two will bring.