After this, I’m packing my things and moving to Kitchener/Waterloo because I will soon be joining my good friend and perfect pair (programmer), maplealmond at PostRank. I’ve got a place to stay temporarily but will be starting a very serious apartment hunt soon after my first day at the new job.

I’m excited at the opportunity to further expand my current Ruby/Rails skills and learn even more new ones while working on a team that is strongly dedicated to producing top-quality code. This new gig will also give me a chance to apply my skills to problems surrounding social media, a topic I’ve become deeply interested in since I’ve been networking with many social media professionals in Toronto.

That all said, I have liked working on this project with the Society and I will miss the people who I’ve been working with these past 11 (or so) months. Particularly, I will miss my manager, who has been excellent to work with. Together, we have achieved a lot in a relatively short period of time. I will miss many others in Toronto, including my family, my friends, and various social groups that I have met with from time to time. I may find myself unable to attend Rails Pub Nite; I will miss every single one of you!

Last Friday Karaoke shall continue, but there will be a special session this month. I’ll be at Anime North on the last weekend of May so I’ve decided that Last Friday Karaoke will be on the second-last weekend of May instead. It turns out that will be the weekend just after my birthday, so Last Friday Karaoke will become Second-Last Friday (or Saturday?) Karaoke, Birthday Edition.  ;)

The Japanese Learner continues to pod-fade, even after PodCamp TO 2010 got me so fired up to do it again. Hopefully I can find some people interested in recording the show with me in Kitchener/Waterloo. With commuting to/from work eating up way less of the hours in my week, I can squeeze in some more Japanese study and podcast work.

I have also been working on a new secret pet project. Hints: it involves Rails 3, GitHub, and has prompted some contributions to Wynn Netherland‘s octopussy, a Ruby wrapper around version 2 of the GitHub API.

I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: where one adventure ends, another begins.

Near the beginning of the year, I decided that I needed to switch gears in my career. I made a very dedicated push towards becoming a full-time Ruby developer, leaving my comfortable position as a J2EE web content management and identity management specialist. My leisure time was consumed with sharpening my Ruby skills and learning new technologies. I made Rails Pub Nite a monthly ritual and networked like crazy on just about every networking site I could. I followed a number of job site feeds and sent out many cover letters and resumes.

Finally, my break came from a very unlikely source: Facebook. I posted to a Ruby on Rails group on Facebook to advertise my skills and experience and offer my services. This was seen by the Systems Manager at the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants, who asked me to send her my resume. I did so gladly and not too long after that I was asked in for an interview.

The project they needed me to work on was definitely very appealing, if a bit ambitious. They wanted to replace the monolithic pile of .NET that was currently doing an incredibly bad job of managing their records and processes and replace that with something leaner, meaner, and more attuned to their needs developed in-house using Ruby on Rails. This was my chance to gain experience working on a large Rails project from the ground up and to do so for a technologically progressive organization providing a valuable service to so many people all over the world.

That project is still on-going, and I recently accepted a permanent position with the Society. We hope to launch an initial release of the project early in the new year and I’m definitely bracing myself for a challenging job in 2010.

The professional networking I did then paid off in other ways as well. I previously wrote about how I helped a very good friend of mine land a job at PostRank. He moved to Kitchener/Waterloo while I moved back to North York, yet another of the changes that 2009 brought.

Finding myself back in Toronto after two years living in Mississauga, I quickly got to work making new friends and reconnecting with old. I’ve started participating in some Meetup groups related to my various interests, as well as events with #GenYTO and the Freshbooks crew. In just a few months, I’ve met some awesome Torontonians (I couldn’t possibly link to you all!).

So, at the end of 2009, I find myself in a new place — well, new in the sense that I haven’t been here in a couple of years — with a new job and new friends.

I am looking forward to 2010 with much excitement.

The turnout from the Toronto Ruby community was excellent and I made and strengthened a lot of professional connections.  I even got some compliments on my display and print-outs!  Just in case you missed them, I’ll be posting them here soon.

It did feel like there were more developers than people looking to hire developers, but this was just the first of what I’m sure will be many such events.  In any case, I did hand out a lot of my brand new business cards and a few of my resumes.

I can’t wait for FutureRuby!

It’s a unique premise for an event that I’m pretty sure only Pete Forde’s imagination could cook up and I’m proud to announce that I’ll be taking part in it.  I will have a posterboard and two binders showcasing my skills and previous work and I’ll also have an extra special surprise.  What’s the surprise?  Stop by and see!  =)

Hope to see you at the Job Fair!