For over five years, I’ve held a bit of an open secret: I’m an alien from fluidic space.

Err, wait, let me start that again.

For over five years, I’ve been working for Telstra. I started off “on the phones”, working in a service call centre. Due to me being a smart-ass (and critical of some very inefficient systems) I was taken off the phones after about two weeks, to write some reporting tools.

From that first app in Excel 97 using VBA to generate charts, I converted to a full-time employee, and went on to bigger and better things. When I wrote that there’s a reasonably good chance of my code having touched your life in some subtle way, I wasn’t joking. The software I wrote helps people in Telstra do their jobs: Routing messages, generating reports, storing data, and keeping an eye on other applications.
I’m proud of the work I’ve done, despite it not being world changing or highly visible. Sure there’s some icky bits (VBA, Oracle, MS Access, Classic ASP), but overall I hope that it’s made people’s lives better, and/or their jobs easier, in some small way.

Today, I resigned from my position at Telstra. It’s not something I did lightly, but, after consideration I’ve decided I need to move on.

For those that are curious, I’m not going to be unemployed - Today I’ve also accepted a contract role to a digital media company in Sydney. I won’t say who, yet, until I’ve had a chance to speak with them some more, but suffice to say it looks like a great company to work for, doing interesting things and meeting interesting people.

Oh, and yes, this means that I’ll be moving from Newcastle / Toronto. I’m still at Telstra until the 26th of October and then I’ll be off to Sydney and new things.

I’d also like to throw a quick shout-out to Nick Hodge for putting in a good word for me, and listening to me rant a little about work; Jack Greenrich for plenty of coding advice and guidance; Ian Ward for getting me hired at Telstra and started down the software development path; and both Markus Hafner and Greg Dwyer of Happener Recruitment for helping me to get this new position.

Exciting times ahead, for sure…