Time to take the red pill.

It was nice. Being a part of the Center of Competence IT-Architecture at the msg.Applied Technology Research for nearly eight years has brought me where I am. It was a pleasure to help customers, projects and coworkers with their daily problems around Java EE and my favorite application servers. But things need progress and there is no progress without change. So it was time to decide weather to take the blue pill - end the thoughts, and wake up in my bed and believe whatever I want to believe. Or to take the red pill - staying in Wonderland and looking how deep the rabbit-hole goes. (see: Matrix quotes)

This is what I did. I took the red pill and so the new year will bring some changes for me. I will be leaving the position I am in. Moving on to another division within the msg systems ag, called Insurance Business Consulting. I will be part of the IT-Strategy and Architecture department and as such working with our customers on their visions and needs. As expected, I have to change my working habits a bit. In the past I was frequently helping a lot of projects during the year (~40/year makes roughly 300 projects in the past years ;) ). From now on, I will work on fewer but probably bigger projects and have the opportunity to structure and design a lot more and do less firefighting.
All this will hopefully not influence my involvement with the Java EE / GlassFish / Oracle community out there. I'll try to get posts out as usual. Even if it looks like, I can not avoid to spend one or two words on insurance related topics in the future :)  So, thanks again for listening and reading. Moving on with an exciting 2011!