I have had the good fortune of receiving an offer of employment from a London-based company, specialising in both Sitecore and ASP.Net MVC solutions (so, right up my street).  I’ll be starting there in February next year.  I’m really excited about it and am looking forward to getting stuck in.

As for what this means for me, it does mean that I’ll be moving to London in a few months.  Until then I’ll be commuting by train from Coventry, which isn’t quite as bad as it sounds – the train to Euston takes only an hour, and then there’s a short tube trip.  All very manageable in the short term.  Once everything settles down, I’ll start the process of moving (again).  Fortunately I haven’t quite unpacked from last time, so there isn’t quite as much work to be done this time around!

Version 6 brings some excellent new features to the table; some which have been present in many other CMS products and others which are pretty unique.  I’m looking forward to working with it in July/August, which is when I’ve been scheduled to redevelop the bit10 website (the final designs for which have been described as “funky but clean”).  We’ll see how it goes; expect to hear more on the topic of Sitecore when the project is done.

More recently, though, is the order that arrived at work on Thursday: bit10 had ordered brand spanking new PCs for the Dev team (yay!). The task of setting them up fell to the bit10 sysadmin (Les), Ross, and myself. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly until we lifted one computer out of a box… we set it right way up to remove the packing foam, and heard an ominous *clunk* from inside the box. Les and I removed the side from the case only to find that Dell had neglected to screw the CPU heatsink onto the motherboard! Surprisingly, the PC booted, but reverting to on-board graphics processing; the heatsink must have damaged the graphics card during transit (I’m just amazed it didn’t knacker anything else [as far as we can tell]). Writing it off as a freak incident, we reached for the next box. Inside this one, we heard more of a rattle than a clunk. Opening this one up, we saw that one of the PCI blanking plates was knocking about inside the case — fortunately, this one appeared to have done no damage.

It is my opinion, that Dell values its smaller customers less: LFRS will, in an average month, probably place around two or three orders with Dell. To my knowledge, this was the first order with Dell from bit10, and it was certainly my first order. I would like to be able to get onto my high horse and say that I won’t be using them in the future, but frankly, Dell does have very good prices, and it’s not feasible to build a laptop from scratch. I shall certainly be keeping my eyes open for alternative vendors, though.

So far, I’m really having a great time (always good where jobs are concerned), and the people are really nice too. The pub lunches, and trips to nice places like Alton Towers help too though .

My work really consists of a mixture of project work, and support requests. Projects are fairly self-explanatory, and support requests are when a client either requests a change to the site, or experiences a problem with it, which I then (try to) fix.

The first week consisted mostly of orientation meetings and learning ColdFusion, which went well enough. There were a few simple change requests that needed doing, too. We also got wind of an upcoming project that we’d be working on, which would kick off in October.

The second week was a little more hectic, with a seemingly endless barrage of support requests being thrown at us. On the bright side, our shiny, new Vista workstations arrived (although it was a struggle to make everything work). There was also a trip to Alton Towers for ‘team building’… great fun – photos on Facebook.

That’s a really brief overview, anyway, I’m being pestered into going to bed. I’m a little sleepy too. I’ll probably find time to write a bit more at a later point.