After a few months of being a BU graduate, I was able to secure a position at Constant Contact (CTCT). Unfortunately, that means I’ll have to leave my role at MIT behind. While I really wanted to grow into a engineering role there, I was deemed too important in my previous role to leave it. So, hello new workplace! I’m looking forward to spending some time in the JVM and understanding how CTCT builds their API. Their services make millions of calls every day, and I’m extremely interested in learning how they scale an operation like that.

There’s a lot that I’ll miss, though. First of all, I will be working with Python much less. That means that I will have to take all my learning from my Java classes at BU into this new job. That’s fine, but man am I going to miss duck typing. Everything will be much more explicit, but also inheritance will be much easier. I find that my general coding style in Python tends to be more procedural. This will be an opportunity to break out of that.

Of course, some of the most difficult portions will be leaving people behind. I have spent many hours getting to know my colleagues. While I don’t expect to be hanging out with them on the regular, I’m excited to see how things will develop for them. It seems like to most painful growing pains are behind them, ODL has sufficiently grown into an inter-departmental powerhouse. That’s part of why now seemed like the best time to leave. While there will most definitely be new challenges for them; the ones that were most interesting to me have begun to taper off. I sincerely wish them the best in sustaining the projects and people that are over there.