After posting about my first month at Ephox, AJ pointed out that he thought my attitudes would soon change. Now that I've been at Ephox for two months, I can give some feedback.

First things first. AJ has managed to keep most of his reputation. I am writing before seeing the movie, so I reserve the right to change my mind.

I think that the honeymoon period has ended for me. I am still having a whole heap of fun, but have had some days that have been hard work. This is to be expected, and normal, so I am not about to run away (you can breath easy now Brett).

Of course things would be better if I could be coding on a shiny new Mac, and the team switched to IntelliJ :).

I have felt the pain of supporting a system across multiple operating systems, multiple JVM versions and multiple browsers (IE,Firefox Win, Firefox Mac, and Safari). To add more complicating factors, we also have people embedding our editor into PHP, ASP, ASP.Net, and various J2EE applications. The team has done a GREAT job of ensuring that EditLive! works accross the wide mix of environments, but we do run into issues from time to time. The pain comes in isolating the problems, and seeing some of the workarounds required in order to support different environments, and conflicting requirements. I have never pushed a platform's APIs as much before, or seen code that had to work as hard in order to get the desired effects.

The high point of the job for me at the moment is the creative coding afternoons. It is great being able to play and formulate ideas, and I have seen some really nice projects implemented by others (more and more should be making their way on to Liveworks). I still get real pride in seeing my code in the wild ;).

It is also great to be in an environment where we take support seriously, and strive to help customers as much as we can. I am very much learning from this, as I have never had this kind of support role before. I am happy that I get the opportunity to do some coding (bug fixes), as I am a coder, and like being able to create and write code (although some of the bug fixes have been way more involved than I would have hoped).

I am still eagerly anticipating moving into development, and look forward to the next release, after which I will be rotating out of support into a full time development role. I will be entering this with some good experience and knowledge of the codebase, and look forward to when I can write my reflective blog entry about this time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 4:59 am and is filed under Ephox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.