As many of you are likely aware, I have designs on advancing my career past where I’m at now (i.e. this post, here, this one and yet another). I think the next few weeks, perhaps even months, may go a long way to determining if that is possible.

I currently work in a 3-man development team. PHP software development. It’s fun stuff, especially since my team is totally awesome, easy to get along with, hilarious… Etc. It’s me and another developer and our lead developer. Three guys.

We’ve been pretty tight on a lot of our development since the other developer joined the team (I have more seniority than he does). We’re rarely ever bored with nothing to do and occasionally we have so much to do that we’re unsure if we’ll have to start deploying overtime work.

Well… He’s leaving. My coworker got a really nice job offer from somewhere else in town that is giving him the position he covets, a Software Architect position for PHP. I’m happy for him, but at the same time, I’m going to miss having him around here, and am slightly worried about life after he’s gone.

Don’t get me wrong. I know I can handle all of the systems and things he did when he was here. His coding style and object-oriented-ness is at least on par with me, in some aspects above me. But I know I can handle all of it and learn everything he did (see this post I already referenced…).

I’m just worried about being able to keep up. It’s like I said, we were pretty tight since he’s been here, and in two Mondays from now, we’ll open up the day without him as an employee for the first time in over a year and a half.

That is the point where I’ll basically be responsible for all of our code and systems. If you read the previous post I already referenced now three times, you’ll see that there is indeed a division of labor and types of responsibilities between me and my lead, so it’s not like all of a sudden I’ll be a lead. But I’ll be the go-to guy for coding the systems, for administering certain things of the systems.

This means I will finally be the man as far as all of our code goes. I’ll be directly responsible for nearly 100% of all of our deployed code and systems. This was the case when I first started here, before they started up the system that my soon-to-be-former coworker currently works on. When they started that one they handed it off to my coworker-at-the-time and he handed it off to my aforementioned soon-to-be-former coworker. Never have I really been responsible for it (and yes, all of that hyphenation was fun).

So this is my chance to really, really shine. To be the f’ing man around here. It’s an exciting prospect and opportunity, really, to have this much responsibility. I mean, I’ve always had a decent level of responsibility around here, but this takes the cake.

So I’m hoping that this reflects really well on me. I know that eventually we’ll have other developers join the team and I’ll no longer have to handle nearly everything as far as the code goes, but I’m really hoping that the higher-ups see the good job I’ll have done by that point and consider me for positions above my current code monkey status. That would rock.

So we’ll see what the future brings!