Let’s get the exciting part of this post out of the way first – as of today I will be leaving Atmos Energy and will be starting at JWT on Monday the 19th!

I’ve been with Atmos for what seems like forever – this is my eighth year here – and I have grown so much in those years. I’ve come from a developer that barely knew OOP and couldn’t design pattern his way out of a paper bag to someone completely different. If you had asked me back in 2002 if I’d be writing articles, running an open source project and have had a few speaking notches under my belt, I would have thrown an Oracle manual at you (which was all new to me at the time). I’ve learned about best practices, fought my own battles with both code and things more on the human interaction level (I hadn’t worked in a large office before this) and have come a long way as a developer.

Atmos has provided me with an environment to make all of this possible – they’ve been receptive to my requests for training and conferences and for letting me try out new things and technologies. I’ve done things here that I can’t say I’ll so at other companies like write applications to interface directly with gas systems and work with huge customer databases (1.5 million customers over 13 states).

Unfortunately, over the last months I’ve become more and more aware that I’ve grown a bit too comfortable in my current skills. You know how it is – you do the same kinds of things over and over (and over) that you get used to doing that thing and not so much developing the applications you know you could. This is a big reason why I’m making the move. I’ve been doing the “gas applications” for a good while now and I wanted some place where I could stretch back out and really get back into a more real form of development. I think that JWT can offer me that so I’ll be starting there two weeks from today.

Thanks to all of you who have supported me in my job hunt, it definitely means a lot! Oh, and if you know of any good PHP developers (Oracle experience a plus) in the Dallas area looking for a job – let me know. I know recommendations would always be appreciated!