The Commuting Year in Review

I was listening to the TWIT year in review on the way into work this morning. I listened to every episode this year while commuting. If totaled in miles it would be a long way.

I started off the year traveling to Northampton by train from Rugby:
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I did that until February. I was working for a marketing company making enhancements to a legacy Delphi based system. It was without a doubt the worst job ever. The people who worked there were idiots, the work environment sucked and it was the most miserable 3 months I have ever spent. Not a great way to start the year.

From there I worked in Hammersmith in London and was taking the train from Rugby to London Euston:

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and then the underground from Euston to Hammersmith:


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I worked there for a local authority creating a portal site for customers. It was done using ASP.NET and C#, with a Biztalk layer connecting the different systems. I was pretty much responsible for the front end which was great. It was a hell commute, but the job was interesting and the people I worked with were great. It was a great step up from the previous job.

Commuting by train and tube was always interesting, sometimes frustrating, but glad I did it. It was a great "life" experience and took me way out of my comfort zone. Having to deal with 4 million other commuters was interesting for a boy from Temuka! I do feel sorry for the people that have to do it everyday for the rest of their working lives. We don't know how lucky we are here in New Zealand when it comes down to it.

From there I worked in Corby which was about an hours drive from Rugby up the A14. The A14 is the road trucks use to get to the M1 and the M6. It was jammed with trucks and the Cathorpe junction where the M6 and M1 merge was always fun! Again it was a great experience and gave me plenty of time to listen to Twit...

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I was the lead architect for a freight management system written in C#, with a Sql Server backend. I also did some training - upskilling some AS400 developers to .NET - which I enjoyed. Again the people were great, but needed a better processes in place, which they were aware of so good luck to them for the future.

I finished there in late August and we flew back to New Zealand and moved into our house in Timaru. (Sorry google doesn't do directions from Heathrow to NZ!)

I now do a daily commute from Timaru to Ashburton which is about an hour.

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I work for a Bank doing the teller systems (MFC/C++) and the Internet Banking Site (.NET). It is all interesting work and I look forward to being involved with the migration from MFC to C# which will be started sometime in 2009.

So all in all I did a lot of commuting this year and will have more next.