What is it, exactly, that I'm doing here?

Finally, a little time to update this thinger..

I think I'll talk a little bit about the whole reason that I've got this wonderful opportunity to live in this wonderful country for eight wonderful months.

I'm working at IBM, as most people know but my job is so freakin cool, I feel like I should elaborate. Within the first 2 or 3 weeks I felt like I was being given so much work and responsibility that I might as well be taking over the whole company, but I'm getting the hang of things now, and while ya, it's a LOT...I absolutely LOVE it!

My official position is "Application Developer" and I'm basically developing web tools for internal clients (people who also work for IBM). Fellow Waterlosers, be patient here...I've found that when I try to explain what I'm doing to people without a technical background they get lost and what I do sounds boring instead of incredibly cool, so i'm going to do this slowly.

As I said, I'm developing web tools. Here's an analogy... Take MSN, and consider it a tool you use while on the internet to chat to your friends. It's got certain features, such as allowing you to have video or voice conversations, you can save your message history, etc. Then the people who made MSN are working to figure out what else their clients (the people who use msn) want the tool to do. Once they figure it out, they build it, and release it to the public, and POOF! You've got a better cooler version of MSN. I'm doing the same sort of thing for about three different tools. One of them, let's call it project BOB, is totally and completely my baby. I'm entirely responsible for setting up meetings and negotiating with the clients to figure out the requirements for the next release (i.e. what cool new features they want the next version to have). Once we've got those all figured out and agreed on I figure out all the technical stuff about how to actually implement it (i.e. write the code) and then I do it!! I'm given an enormous responsibility in this position, I totally manage myself, it's amazing! The other two projects (we'll call them Project JOE and Project JIM) I'm just gathering all the requirements and doing the solutioning for... For some reason my employers and managers have it in their heads that i've got these really good soft skills...something about me being outgoing or something...so that's why I've got the job of working with the clients on these projects, which can be very politically sensitive. COOL!!!

Another thing that's cool about this is that I'm working as a member of an international team, meaning that two of the people on my team I work with the most are working out of Austria and New York. All of my clients are also international, so I spend a good portion of time on the phone with one of those super cool headsets. HA...I know I'm a nerd....it's ok to be thinking that right now.

So that's what I'm doing!!! Maybe it still sounds boring to you, but I think I've got a wonderful opportunity to learn a lot and develop a lot of skills over these next few months. Not only am I going to develop my technical skill set, but the business aspects of the job are so cool! I don't really have any past work experience like that, and the amount of responsibility they give me is enormous.

Sweeeeeet!
Here's a pic of me and Michael at the Office. Michael is one of the guys I work really closely with from Austria, he was in the office visiting for a week. Super cool guy, we'll meet up again when the team goes to Vienna for a vacation at the end of February. Notice that there are no cubicles or anything! Just an open office, we all sit at long tables...it's different :P