All Things Patrick - Working Hard to be Lazy!

Back in September of last year I wrote a post about my job hunt in No More Vegas and an ending note about the jobs in Kansas City. Where else to start except at the beginning (of the end?). To protect the names of the innocent (and the not so innocent) I won't mention any names.

Downtown Kansas City, Take 1, RCS, beginning of October to end of November -

I ended up with a job in Kansas City at a marketing agency I'll call RCS. It had started years ago as a print media company and as the internet blossomed it started adding web sites to it's list of offerings. The business started at about 66%/33% print/internet and now they're about 66%/33% internet/print - their business has completely shifted. Their initial web offerings was limited to static web pages, later they outsourced dynamic pages to a ColdFusion developer, & finally they ended up with their own in house development staff.

When I went through the interview process I asked certain questions. Maybe I didn't ask the right people the correct questions because after I got started I found a completely different picture than what I had thought had been painted during the interview process. I had asked about LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), source code versioning (subversion, cvs, etc), development cycle, OOP, a framework or at the very least a library of code, and several other things. It sounded like it was a good match - they did inform me though that they did have two Windows servers which were required for the legacy ColdFusion and ASP code. I figured no problem, I won't have to deal with those unless I have to mess with some of the ColdFusion or ASP code. I especially thought this was a good match not only because the lead developer programmer/server admin liked Gentoo (even his desktop was running Gentoo) and disliked Windows, but the long-time owner of the marketing company was a Mac person and very anti-Microsoft (she also owned the Mac store down the hall which is also certified to do Mac repairs!)

And then it all came crumbling down...