The big news in my life right now is that the company I work for just went through a merger, so TSSI is no more, and ProjectDX is now part of Renewable Funding. I decided to accept the offer presented by the new owners—and it came with a bit of a promotion—so I am now Software Development Manager and responsible for guiding and growing the Portland development team.

Thankfully, even though Renewable Funding is based in Oakland, CA, there are no plans to move our team down there. We’ll be staying in Portland and continuing to work on the public-facing web application that provides communities with tools to educate their residents about sustainability programs and allow property owners to manage applications for PACE financing programs.

I’m looking forward to figuring out my new role as I step into a management position. Although I’ve always been a natural leader—I’ve served as technical lead on various teams and held a lot of influence over team and process design in my consulting work—this is the first time I’ve been responsible for personnel management and had people reporting to me in the org-chart. I don’t pretend to know all there is to know about being a great manager, but I have the benefit of some great mentors and a fantastic team to start with. I’ve always done my best work when I’m thrown in just a bit over my head, and this is definitely pushing my boundaries (especially when combining the new responsibilities with navigating a merger).

Hello, World! (?)

I’ve had the decision to completely restart my website made for me. The previous incarnation of my site was being generated via a post-commit hook in a git repository that lived on a VM at Slicehost. I decided to shut down that VM and move the website to a system that I didn’t have to maintain. Unfortunately, I thought that I had the git repository mirrored on my GitHub account, but apparently not. I’m sure I could come up with usable backups if I put forth enough effort, but let’s be honest: thanks largely to Twitter, I had barely updated the site in the last 2 years, and a lot of what was there was either outdated or of no real value to anyone other than myself.

So here we go again. This time around, I’m just using GitHub’s pages feature to publish the site. I don’t have to maintain the server, and now I know that the repository is on my GitHub account.

UPDATE I’m actually switching to using toto with Heroku. I like toto better than jekyll, because I don’t have to put up with using the Liquid page templating engine. Plain-old ERB FTW!