This project transition is smoother than the others. I’m joining another Drupal project right away. I’ve drafted estimates and documents of understanding for another Drupal project, and my manager is lining up some consulting for us to work on together. I’m not taking a vacation other than the statutory holidays. Two trips for my sister’s wedding took all of my vacation days! (Worth it, though.)

What’s working well about this transition:

• Getting the agreements set up for my next project took much less time than I expected, even though it’s cross-border. It could be because I’m joining an existing project.
• We’re winding down this project gracefully. It helps that we’ve focused on lower-risk items towards the end, and that we’ve scheduled in time for documentation. It also helps that we launched two weeks before project end. We’ve had time to deal with bugs and add features, and we can be more confident that the client’s set up for success.

I want to keep working on Rails at work, but I don’t think I’ll get any Rails projects in the pipeline any time soon. I’m sure the upcoming projects will be lots of fun too, though, and there are so many non-Rails techniques I want to improve on anyway. I’d like to learn how to use Selenium to test websites using multiple browsers, and I might get a chance to do that on this project. It would be good for me to learn more about consulting skills on other projects, and I’m definitely looking forward to taking advantage of my manager’s mentoring. I’ve got Quantified Awesome as a personal Rails project, and I might tinker around with Android development as well.

Now that we’re not scrambling to squeeze in as much as we can before the project end date, I’m looking forward to normal hours. More space for extracurriculars!