Arrivederci, Westat
Today was my last day at Westat. I gave nearly two months notice and was quite busy for most of those two months, trying to document as much as I could and to pass on what I could of what I did.
It’s been an interesting career, at least from my standpoint. I mean, pretty boring in many ways, at least in the telling. I studied Agriculture at the University of Maryland but while I was finishing up there, I got a job with a contractor at the National Weather Service. That was back in the early days of the computer revolution, just after the release of the original IBM PC in 1981.
We had a computer in our home before that, in 1987 or so, when dad bought an Ohio Scientific Superboard II. I bought the first computer of my own, an NEC APC, in 1984 shortly before Cathy and I got married. I taught myself Pascal and dBase and taught computer classes in Alaska, worked for an accounting firm, a non-profit, and a national franchise, all more in the accounting line than the computer field, but always dealing with computers in one way or another.
In 1997, shortly after Dorothy was born, I shifted back to computers in a big way, coming to Westat and building their corporate Web site as well as a few internal Web-based systems. While there, I learned Perl, PHP, and SQL and developed some custom applications for a few projects, becoming fairly proficient. Eventually, with the growth of PHP based systems such as WordPress and Drupal, I was pulled into that world and ended up supporting those, along with being the administrator for a bunch of Linux servers.
I’m not done with computers, of course, but now it’s mostly for myself and I’m looking forward to what will come. I’ll miss many of my coworkers and hope to see some of them from time to time. But I don’t think I’ll miss my actual job too much. Anyway, Westat is leaving its Rockville campus in a few months, so I’d be saying goodbye to this building in any case.