Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing…

The last few days flew by for me. After 2.5 years of working for my previous employer, I decided it was time for a new challenge. In the past period I’ve learned a lot, and had the opportunity to learn and research a lot of new things and techniques.

In 2010 I started working for the company, and began as a Data Warehouse (DWH) developer. Before my first day on the job, I had pretty much no experience with a DWH. That was quite a challenge, especially because there was no documentation at all. So I needed to find out everything myself, because there wasn’t a real DWH developer before I started there.

This also gave me a chance to dive into Reporting solutions. The company ran a Reporting Services machine with tons of Management-, Marketing-, Sales- and Development-reports. These reports varied from showing turnover information, to showing the IT department the (partial) morning check.

Eventually I ended up building reports, cubes, and developing and maintaining the DWH. This was my daily job for almost a year, next to helping out my team, consisting of about 10 to 15 .NET developers.

After about a year, management decided to let an external company develop our DWH. That gave me more time to focus on building reports, and doing more development work for our test- and production environments. That year I started with spatial data in SQL Server. This was one of the coolest things I got go do in the 2.5 years I spent there.

The hardest thing to give up wasn’t the company or the job, but it was the team. It was a pretty young team of developers, and most of the guys (and the one gal we had) were pretty awesome. There was always someone who could help you out, and the team members had no problems with working late to help a colleague out. The team was amazing!

But like I said, after more then 2 years, it was time for something new. While reading a blog post by SQLRockstar (Blog | @SQLRockstar), I read a beautiful quote that convinced me I made the right decision:

“Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing”

This is a quote from the movie Fight Club. It tells us that nothing comes without sacrifice. You can’t achieve anything without taking risks, and sticking out your neck. This is what I’m about to do…

I can’t tell you yet what my next challenge will be, but I’m very excited to start my new job. I’m hoping to write a blog post next week, telling you more about that… 🙂