My contract at Vesta ended yesterday, which means that I'm more or less free to do as I please for a little while.
This is a nice feeling. I'm pretty pleased with the work that I did during my contract even if it was, at times, rather stressful. Vesta moves at a freaky pace, and I began to think of it as a boot camp for developers.
I got to work with some very intelligent people who managed to take on superhuman quantities of work. Vesta is one of Oregon's fastest growing companies, but it didn't bring on much new help as the workload grew. This is understandable given that it is, at least as far as I can tell, still a relatively small business.
This led to leads doing developer work, developers doing QA work, and the QA team, with nowhere left to turn, doing executive level work.
It was a bit odd.
Challenging, and even fun at times, but very wild-westish.
Given how quickly things move there, how much work there was to do, and the months-long feeling of constantly plugging holes in a dam with every available developer finger (and toe (and other things)), it's hard for me to believe that it's stopped. I feel like the coyote in those old Warner Brothers cartoons - Moving along at a breakneck speed with rocket-powered roller skates strapped to my feet, and then suddenly plunging over a cliff into nothing...
But I'm not plunging over a cliff.
I would like rocket-powered roller skates, though.