End of Era 7 (or so)

Today was my last day at Independent Online, my most enjoyable workplace ever. As I've mentioned before, it was really the opportunity to work on Jam Warehouse's Open Source KnowledgeTree project and to have time to work on other things that made me leave. So I'm quite sad. The staff (as per custom) sent around a card where everyone wrote their best wishes or something more personal. I was flattered that so many wrote about how much of an impact I'd made in the short time I was there.

Over the past six weeks, I've been performing handover to my two developers, as we've not yet found a replacement for me. (If you haven't already applied, and have good programming skills, consider it.)

Handover is quite cathartic. Predominantly, it showed me how much I'd achieved - how much I'd been responsible for and thus how valuable an employee I was.

There was, however, this feeling of inadequacy, in that there was still a lot of inelegant code. Lots of inelegant code I hadn't improved. But more irritating in that I'd written a non-trivial amount too. Whether it was time constraints, laziness, or whatever, someone has to deal with it later. I'll take consolation that I left things in a better situation than when I arrived.

But, I'm really looking forward to starting at Jam in a week's time. Before then, I'm going to be talking at the 2nd Open Source Software Africa conference, and then taking two days' away from work to recover.