There is some mystery time warp device which absorbs time when you're having fun. There is also a nasty tunnel monster which lives on Britain's railways and gobbles up all your freetime whilst you're travelling to and from work. At least, it does when you commute from Northampton to London every day.
At the end of last year I resigned from my job and took 5 weeks of holiday to enjoy Christmas, New Year, get married and take a 2 week honeymoon in Cuba. When I returned I started a new job working as a developer on MOO.COM's almighty dev team. Since then I've been enjoying working in the heart of London's tech & startup scene sharing an office with the likes of Tweetdeck, SoundCloud & Lanyrd and working just down the road from Last.fm, TechHub & Pachube.
Working at MOO has been a breath of fresh air. The agile development methodology employed at MOO suits me well and I quickly got settled in and stuck into some really interesting projects, such as working on MOO's new sticker products [obligatory plug ;)] an enormous project, which amusingly started around the same time as this blog stopped.
The challenge of having to learn, code & deliver actionscript components inside a 2 week sprint reminded me of why I love bring a web developer. I've also discovered that I have a real strength for frontend development & jQuery has become my new favourite tool. My unusual passion for analytics & data, apparently something "normal developers" are not a fan of, also reared it's head and has resulted in me getting my hands dirty with some serious business intelligence SQL.
So far it's been a wild ride. It's been a super positive experience adapting from working alone on projects to working in one of four teams of developers and one of they key things I've learned I'm learning is how to just get stuff done. Code (well) now, refactor (better) later and with the hindsight of having already gotten it working. I've become so much more confident & my code output both in and outside of work is improving.
Now all I have to do is learn to apply those productivity skills to other aspects of my life such as blogging, podcasting, oh... and housework.