All is well on the home front

After a month at my new job, I can finally settle down and write a
post. It's been pretty tough, but I guess that's what I signed up for.
After 6-1/2 years of writing VB Code, I was definitely ready to move
on and away from Microsoft. Embark/The Princeton Review, way back
when, was actually set up to be a MS sort of prototype company. I
think they even gave us a grant or something to set up absolutely
everything MS to see how it would all behave together- VB components,
scripted with ASP, with a SQL Server backend, manipulated by nightly
jobs run with MS Transaction server, etc etc. I was quite sick of the
philosophy of "make it really hard to learn so you have to pay for our
classes" type of mentality on MS's part. It is quite evident, and not
just an illusion or bias that I have. I have my experience working in
that environment, and have read many accounts of that thought process
driving MS's development arena. So, when I say "I hate Microsoft", I
have my reasons.
My goal with new employment after TPR was to work with open source
languages, Java, and things that I generally think will not lock me
into one company's tools, and will instead allow me to learn universal
concepts and new ways of doing things. And have an excited knowledgable community that I can go to for help. My problem however, was that
companies, of course, tend to hire people WITH skills and not those
that WANT skills. Somehow, even given that, I found a position with an
ex-coworker from Embark days (before TPR bought it), with a very small
staff of 15 people, working with Java, C++, SQL Server, Linux. I'm
pretty happy- my first project (and only project up until today) was
writing an ant script to replace an antscript/Makefile combo that
automated a C++/Java build that would also run on Windows or Linux.
Problems were: the source code is slightly different between Windows
and Linux and only the Windows version is checked into VSS, the Linux
version is just on this one linux box; the code was not entirely
working yet, and I had to successfully compile on Windows and Linux;
the company is so small, that not all changes even get checked into
VSS on a regular basis; the app that I was automating the build for is
comprised of 8 smaller projects with hundreds of C++ files. Quite a
good first project eh? Each day I would feel overwhelmed but would
take it one step at a time. And also given the size of the company,
there are not too many people available for me to ask questions, so
that was a big problem as well. Developers on average aren't very good
at communicating, and I found this to be definitely the case, at least
me being a brand new employee and my one goto guy being a senior
developer who seems to have been involved in every product here.
So there is my recap of the last month. Lots of other stuff going on,
but will write about later..