I'm LinkedIn

I heard from a former coworker last week. She invited me to join her network on LinkedIn. It looked interesting and I respect her, so I joined. So now I'm LinkedIn, yay for me.

My network only contains the one person, so I should try to increase it I guess. I'm not sure who I should ask to join. It would be a good time to try to find some of my old TUNS (now DalTech) fellow students and find out how they are doing. Back then around 1/2 the TUNS CS Class of 1997 joined Nortel, who I'm sure would have hired the other half too if we'd wanted to join. I wonder what became of them. At least of some of them are likely still there, but certainly not all of them.


My friend's network was interesting. She has around 12 people. Some of the names I recognized as people I'd worked with before. One guy I knew from St. Mary's and TUNS. Some of the others were well known players in the local startup scene. It was pretty good company to be in, so it's nice to be remembered positively after we'd worked together in the past.

One time there was this insane Core Networks project where she was team lead and everyone was working really hard on it. There was a key integration testing weekend before the first baseline went to the test team, and she said that everyone was on call and had to come in if problems were found in their area. I had a quiet weekend. On the Monday after she told me she'd phoned everyone else in the department over the weekend except me with code issues. No problems were found in my code. That's kind of a party trick I have of writing all kinds of features and lines of code with very low defect rate, something I take pride in. I take bugs in my code personally, but in my career I've noticed that few others do. Most people I've ever worked with are indifferent to bugs in their code.

It has made me realize I've been part of the Halifax software startup scene for nearly five years now. In my own modest way I've contributed to building a new company, and to building the Halifax software industry. I think it will be interesting to see what directions my career takes in the next five years.