I spent a lot of time in front of windows of various types today. On the flight up — a short flight from Sacramento to Portland, too — my new co-workers were good enough to let me have the window seat. Actually, neither of them wanted it, so I had no problem snagging it. Of course, the flight was on Southwest Air, which was sort of a cattle call as we were being herded on to the plane itself. The flight was kind of crowded, and short. And I sat next to the window, with the morning sun streaming right into my face. I could look down onto the clouds and see the sunlight reflected off of them.

I do love flying. I will be doing quite a bit of it over the next couple of months; perhaps I’ll get sick of it soon, but for now, I really am enjoying it.

At the Portland office, I discovered that desk space is a rarity, indeed. I don’t have a desk, and certainly not a cubicle. I have a card table with a computer on it, situated against the western window of the building. Behind me is the technical support manager, who has gobs of ideas for projects and tasks for me. So before me lies a wonderful view of the hills of Portland, and behind me are piles of work for me.

And, of course, my computer didn’t work when I turned it on… something about being unable to see the network. So the LAN manager, who has been with the company for eight weeks — which, because this is a startup company, means he’s one of the "old-timers" — spent the entire day fussing with the cables, the cards, the hubs, and so on — while I dug out my laptop with the network card that I had just happened to buy over the weekend, and set myself up to do some actual work.

Suffice to say, I’m a bit overwhelmed here. Okay, I’m here to do web development. Yesterday I learned that this can entail going beyond straight HTML and JavaScript to Perl, other middleware, WML, and more. Today I learned that I’ll be interviewing candidates for supporting developers, QA personnel, and technical writers; documenting the entire web development process in the parent company with an eye towards creating a complete development manual for the child company’s web product; designing and implementing a web data migration protocol; and delving into marketing and serious testing as well. I’m overwhelmed, but very excited. As opposed to the minor growth opportunities that there were for me at the University, this place is so wide open that I could go just about anywhere with my career. While at the University I had to kick and scream to get any sort of growth opportunity, I suspect that with this company, I’d have to kick and scream if I wanted to stay in one spot.

There is a downside to all of this, of course. While I put in a normal 8-hour day yesterday in California, today I put in a 16-hour day, from the "working flight" in the morning where we discussed implementation strategies to the "working dinner" where we brainstormed about just about everything to do with the company. There’s a part of me which hopes I can just sit in my little cubicle and happily code away for eight hours each day; but there’s a bigger part of me which knows that this job situation simply won’t allow for that. And, more importantly… I’m glad about that.