If you hadn’t heard yet, Jornata merged with BlueMetal. As part of the merger, BlueMetal organized a session of “BlueMetal Academy” to help transition the team. In spirit of a true merger, Jornata members participated as trainers, as well, showing that Jornata’s culture is really being assimilated, not purged. (The merger is a solid marriage, rather than simple annexing of resources, both sides bring common values but distinct strength to the partnership).
At the end of the training, we were asked to come up with one word to reflect what we’d learned over the course of it. Just one… on a moment’s notice. Responses were things like “Integrity”, “Consistency”, “Connection”, “Inspiration”, “Committed”, “Legit” and a few other words of similarly positive connotation.
I had the advantage of being among the last in line to respond, so I considered each of them as they were spoken. In my head, I responded to each word as it was spoken. “Yes”, “True”, “Good one”… those all fit. “What says all of that?”, I thought. Digging deep, I could only think of one word that conveyed all those qualities… everything we learned. there’s only one word that says it all, and I didn’t say it to play Captain Obvious… “BlueMetal”
Ok… the cool-aid is either totally Stepford, or totally legit.
Given my experience with BlueMetal teammates in both the SharePoint AND Windows Phone Dev communities, before I ever had the opportunity to join… it’s not Stepford.
That said, I think the expected answer was “Mahan”, as in Mahan Khalsa, author of “Helping Clients Succeed” which plays an over-arching theme across the company. Someone may have even said that, but I didn’t catch it. I still like my original answer.
This past spring I joined Jornata, mostly to shake up my career. Jornata was/is a fantastic team to be a part of in its own right. My prior experience with them in the SharePoint community was also first rate.
I might have pursued a job at BlueMetal years ago on my own were it not for the daunting commute.
The winds of change clearly had more in store.
Now, I find myself thinking that BlueMetal really looks like the company I always had in mind to work for when I was teaching myself programming as a kid.. and I mean everything.. from its respected thought leaders to its community involvement to its extremely purposeful corporate structure… being employee-owned… I realize this team is top to bottom, front to back, enterprise ready, industrial strength, yet premium consumer quality… and they have my back. It will be my honor to have this team’s back.
I’m very much looking forward to settling into the new team, and really looking forward to digging in on a nice juicy app development project. Duty to the customer has pulled me quite a bit toward infrastructure build outs… Being successful at those things has had the curse of being asked to do more of it. The further away from C# I get, the further I am from my true passion & real value add, and that doesn’t really cut it for me or my team, longer term.
so… the commute sucks… but if that’s all I can think of to “complain” about… I guess that’s what it takes to be “The Granite State Hacker”, for keeps. (I’ll secretly blame NH politicians for making it so hard to find a sufficiently legit tech offices in NH, and work at home every chance I get.)
This marks a new chapter for my career, without a doubt, and I’m sure I’ll be inspired to blog deeper than what had become all too common Microsoft cheerleading posts. (Now I can be a BlueMetal cheerleader, too! ok… I’ll try to refrain from geeking out about my team too much.)
