2013 has been a ridiculous year when it comes to projects and priorities for me at work. It seems like the workload never lessens as I make progress on things, but rather keeps increasing as more opportunities for improvement or upgrades are found.
The majority of my time has been taken up with software development of an internal line-of-business application (using ASP.NET C#). Not just programming but information gathering, analyzing business rules, defining requirements, coordinating with an external developer, writing SQL scripts to point the developer to the right data and programming to finish the application off.
I have genuinely enjoyed this project; it’s not really often that one in IT gets to ‘build’ something, especially something that will be a cornerstone of the company’s processes and procedures. However if you had asked me a few years ago whether this would be part of my responsibilities, it would be one of the furthest things from my mind.
One of the problems with building skills in this area and devoting so much time to it is that there is always just one more site to build; one more business process that can be improved with a little bit of database and interface magic. Which is exciting but ultimately not what I want to be doing for the next 10 years.
The more I think about this subject and my career path, the more I have come to realize that I’d really like to get back to IT Projects. This would be implementation projects like Microsoft Exchange, Citrix XenApp, disaster recovery infrastructure and more. I have neglected this side of my duties simply due to time constraints, and I miss being so involved in my infrastructure.
These thoughts have been discussed with my supervisor, although a plan of action has yet to be determined. I feel better knowing that my future is less of a gray area, and I have defined the path that I wish to follow.
