Over the last three weeks (or so) I have been living a very lovely, if utterly unrealistic, existence. I have been on paternity leave, spending every day with my wonderful wife, our delightful daughter, and our brand new baby son; it may have been hard work, but it has been a real joy as well.

Now I have to get back to reality, as the family bread-winner I have to go back to work.

I have made my peace with the fact that I am not going back to the BBC, where I have spent the vast majority of my working life in the last two years, and even though I am going to miss that place terribly I am really looking forward to the next phase in my career. I am going back into the workplace having agreed to take a permanent position, a calculated move that has been quite a long time in the planning which has been a considered choice in order to evolve my career away from pure engineering and into engineering management. I am going to be the European Head of Engineering for W3Corporate specifically on their Vivastreet brand, responsible for development on their website applications and back-office applications in PHP and Ruby, both in London and looking after an off-shore team in Eastern Europe.

To say that I am excited would be an understatement, but of course I also have all the ‘first night nerves’ that most people experience before starting a new job. In my last role I filled-in for the tech lead, and did a little bit of management stuff as circumstances demanded, so I have confidence that I am ready for it all… Doesn’t stop me being anxious form time to time though.

In a week’s time I will be at Heathrow, waiting to get on a plane to New York; one of the mixed blessings of this new job is that I have to go to New York for three weeks, to sync up with the engineering team over there, learn the codebase and platform and meet with some of the commercial people. So I get to spend three weeks in New York; awesome! I have to spend three weeks away from my little, recently slightly larger, family; not so great 🙁

I intend to catch up on sleep, do a couple of geeky things, and maybe catch up with friends in the Eastern States, but overall I want to make a good impression, get some good work done and get home having, hopefully, impressed a few important people, got my head around the codebase, and come up with some workable ideas as to how to make my mark…

So, if you are in New York between the 23rd of September and the 11th of October and want to catch-up / meet-up, let me know…

Onward!