It's funny how your life can go full circle at times. After a four year career detour, I'm happy to return to Roundedcube as the new programmer on the block. As one of the Original Five employees at Roundedcube, it's good to be back and to work with friends from the start of my programming career. The company has grown a lot while I was gone. We're up to 16 employees now with many new clients while still maintaining relationships with many of the clients I have worked with in the past.
I think the coolest change I've seen (besides the new building of course) is that all of our teams consist of more than one person now! There are dedicated project managers, designers, sales-ers (?), and a large programmer pool. It's nice to be able to know what your team is working on and have a defined role in the process and definitely improves performance and the final product.
As a developer, the opportunities to learn new technologies and business practices are great. Much of the business now is directed towards Content Management Systems, specifically Sitecore. While I'm sure there's a learning curve to CMS development, the solutions we can provide to our clients make for interesting projects so I'm looking forward to working on my first CMS-based project.
One of the challenges in returning to a place you've worked before is figuring out what you need to remember from your previous time there and what you have to forget. In many ways it's harder than starting at a new company because you find yourself slipping into familiar habits of the ways things used to be done instead of thinking about how to do them now. I think it's better to do something, even if it's wrong, then to sit around and wait for someone to hold your hand. Well, that's assuming that it doesn't take too long to clean it up later.
*EDIT October 28, 2010. We have moved our blog to http://blog.roundedcube.com and you can now comment on this specific post at http://www.roundedcube.com/WhatsNew/Blog/the-return-of-one-of-the-original-five
