What a Difference a Year Makes

I've been at my new job for a year now and I'm totally amazed at what's occurred and what I've accomplished. Of course I couldn't have done any of it alone. Management and my co-workers were/are a major factor. They have encouraged me and supported me and allowed me to grow (and they continue to do so).

Here's a brief summary:

• My employer has purchased and deployed JIRA and Confluence (partly due to my recommendation and experience) of which I've become co-administrator.
• I've also become co-administrator for the Enterprise Service Bus that forms the base of our new SOA patterned integration layer.
• I set up and continue to administrate the development, build, and continuous integration environments which leverage Subversion, JUnit, Cobertura, and CruiseControl.
• The boss that hired me moved to another position within the company and now I'm working for the same fantastic boss that I had at my first IT job.
• I obtained my ITIL Foundation certification
• I've leared a great deal more about Hibernate, Spring, Service-oriented Architecture, and XML/XSL both on my own and under the guidance of the lead developer and architect.
• I've settled into a leadership role helping to define development, deployment, and management frameworks as well as assisting in the design of SOA components and validation of architecture decisions.

With results (and support) like that I think this company is one that I could stay with for a very long time. I'm really looking forward to the next year and beyond!