Friday was my last day working for Green Hat Consulting. I start my new job tomorrow, and this is something I’m very excited about …but more on that later.

I’ve been at Green Hat almost seven years (!) working as an enterprise integration consultant. In 2002 during the dot-com bubble-burst, shortly after I graduated, I was forcibly ejected into a job-seeking situation, and Green Hat Consulting is where I ended up. So it’s not exactly a career path I chose. It chose me. Since then I’ve been sent to work at various different client projects, each of these being very much like starting a new job. Seven years working at the same company almost seems like a lack of ambition in today’s job market, but at Green Hat it’s felt like I’ve done seven or eight different jobs over the years.

I think probably my most enjoyable assignment was the year and half spent working at Alstom in Swizerland, not just because I got to enjoy two full seasons of snowboarding, but because I was able to take a lead within the small team and get stuck into some really juicy development work involving JSPs and applets. But there’s been good times on every assignment, and I’ve met lots of great people.

Back at the Green Hat headquarters I’ve seen a lot of people come and go, so that has been a constantly varying experience over the years too. These days the development of GH Tester is really stepping up a gear, especially GH Tester version 5 which adds some spectacular features for BusinessWorks developers. I wish them good luck with that, and I’m sure Green Hat will continue to go from strength to strength.