Zurich

I am travelling to Zurich in Switzerland very early tomorrow morning. It will be the third time I've been to Zurich. I am going to meet a new client that we have at Cognizant (my current employer). The client is called Euro Tax Glass.

Euro Tax Glass (ETG) provide business intelligence services to the automotive industry. The interesting point about this visit is that I am going to be working on a system called UVMP (Used Vehicle Market Place) which is funded by General Motors. I worked on the original version of this system when I was working for Modem Media back in 1997. It appears that I have come full circle. 11 years after working on the version 1 I am going back to the same program of work to work on a version 5 I think. Everything has changed. The original version was ATG Dynamo on Oracle. It is now wall-2-wall IBM.

Given that as I have said I have come full circle I guess now would be a good time to take a look at the last 10 or so years of my career in Web Development and IT in general. What have I achieved, have I achieved what I set out to do and where do I want to go.

I joined Modem Media back in 1996 it was a great time to join an interactive agency. The dot com boom was forming, everyone was very excited about the world wide web (we have a lot to thank Tim Berners-Lee for in my opinion) and most importantly businesses were starting to realise the potential of the web and were putting some money into web based initiatives (some more successful than others). I stayed with Modem Media until 1999. The reason I left was that I wanted to get more experience in IT and Modem was basically an interactive advertising agency, or at least that was the mentality of the London office. I had a great time working for Modem and particularly enjoyed working with Bill Roberts, Simon Andrews and Tim Sexton amongst others. However I wanted to get more heavily involved in the "heavy lifting" aspects of IT. The time was right to move, the industry was full of openings and positions for someone like me. I moved to Associated New Media which is now called Associated Northcliffe Digital. I spent 1 year there working mainly on Y2K issues...More on that another time.

I have a friend arriving soon from Leeuwarden and I need to pack for this trip to Zurich.