On February 2nd, Groundhogs Day (3rd favorite holiday :), I started a new job. I am now the Vice President of Product Development at TourFactory, a small company based in Spokane. They provide a web-based service to real-estate agents to help them market the homes they are selling.

The application is built primarily in classic ASP and I've been a bit nostalgic over the years for the simplicity of that platform, but I'm over that now :). I can't wait to begin the process of converting the product to .Net (one of the reasons I was hired). Classic ASP is simple, unfortunately it's a bit too simple. There is not very good support for debugging or Intellisense and there are many language features that I've grown accustomed to in my years as a .Net developer that are missing.

So far the job has been great. The people there are very easy to work with and are excited about some of the changes that I want to make, especially to the deployment cycle (more on this in another post).

This is my first management position, but I only have to manage 3 other developers, so hopefully I will be able to handle it. I've had the opportunity to work for a couple of great managers that I really respect over the years, so hopefully I have picked up a few good habits from them.

For those that know me, I still live in Arlington Washington, a town over 300 miles away and on the other side of the Cascade mountains from Spokane. I work every other week in Spokane and am in the process of getting an apartment there.

Spokane is a neat city to work in. You can get through most of downtown without going outside through a series of pedestrian walkways that go through many of the buildings. This is nice because it can get pretty cold in winter and awfully warm in summer. There is also a nice park within a couple blocks of the office that includes rides, trails, trees, a river, and more. There are also a bunch of restaurants in the area that look pretty good, though I've only had the opportunity to go to one so far.

The building I work in is the Fernwell Building. It was build in 1891, almost 120 years old! Thankfully the building does have electricity, air conditioning, and fiber optics. It is a nice building and has been well maintained. My office is on the 3rd floor, far left corner (see picture below).