Taking a ride down the sunshine highway

2009.03.03

I just wanted to let everyone know that there is a big change coming up in my life. After much thought, discussion, and stress I have decided to leave New City Media. I've lived here in Blacksburg, VA for nearly six years and worked at NCM for two of them. The family-like-culture, environment, and surroundings made this a nearly impossible decision to make. I had the opportunity to work with industries in nearly every walk of life. From small family-owned companies to billion-dollar corporations. Tourism, real-estate, jewelery, industrial manufacturing, education, world-wide non-profits, biotechnology, New City Media gave me the opportunity to be a part of all of these.

I have accepted an offer to join the NFi Studios Interactive Team. NFi develops and maintains several products including MemberFuse. They are located in downtown Orlando, FL which means I will be making my triumphant return to the sunshine state. I spent 9 years in Jacksonville, Florida before moving up here to Appalachia. The office environment and culture at NFi appears to be very relaxed and informal, much like NCM.

I'm excited to be working with web-application type projects. NFi uses the Zend Framework for their enterprise applications. I had the opportunity to take a peak under the hood of one of their projects and was blown away by the quality of their work. I can't wait to get down there and join the team.

Working for New City Media has left me tainted. I've come to realize that I will never be able to work for Corporate-America because of the environment that David Poteet, president NCM, has developed. The first thing I found myself asking companies about was their office environment. Everyone here has been wonderful to me in good times and bad, and I will never forget these last two years.

I'll be moving to Orlando (east side) this weekend and can't wait to jump into the geek-community.

If anyone has any tips, suggestions, or interesting tidbits about the area, happenings, or anything else you think would be useful for my situation please share them.

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Comments

Cory Collier on (3.9.2009 2:38 pm) says

Mike,
I worked at NFi for a little better than a year, and I can assure you that you're going to a pretty cool place. I hope you're not bashful, or otherwise reserved. MemberFuse is a killer product that started when I was at NFi. I hope you treat it well ;)

Typically on the first week of a newb's start at NFi, I get to heckle them a bit at Friday Happy Hour. I'll be in TX this week, so you'll get it in a week from this Friday.

I look forward to it >:)

P.S. I enjoyed reading your post about your experience with the Zend Certification Exam. I keep meaning to take that, and I keep putting it off. I appreciate the brief on what to expect.

Rob Zienert on (3.9.2009 2:57 pm) says

On behalf of HYDRA, welcome to Orlando. NFi are good people.

David Harris on (3.9.2009 4:08 pm) says

Welcome to Orlando!  
If you're looking to get involved in the Orlando tech scene, the following list of groups/clubs in Orlando should be of interest: 
http://barcamp.org/BarCampOrlandoGroups

I'm glad you discussed the Zend certification since currently the Orlando PHP group is working on obtaining that cert :)
http://php.meetup.com/101