Today is officially my one-year anniversary with GE Aviation.  On top of that, I hit my 31st birthday this month and on the same day I hit my 5-year anniversary in Portland.

Last year I was meeting my co-workers for the first time as we got onto a jet to fly to Austin, Texas.  I spent my first week of employment meeting my new team that I’d be working with and trying to get my computer up and running. The legal entity of GE I work for is Austin Digital, a group of around 15 developers and a number of other people totally around 40 people.  I work at the Portland office, which consisted of five developers before I was hired and is now seven.  The group is small, but we create some excellent projects.

Since my beginning, I worked with my small team here in Portland, four of us, to develop an entire web API and a web portal to view some of our existing products online.  I’ve gained experiences working with technologies I’d never really used before.  From starting to use javascipt/typescript to embedding Tableau into our site with Tableau’s javascript API.  I’ve had a good time so far and have learned quite a lot in my short year here at GE Aviation.

It’s that one year mark, and to me, it means I need to figure out what I’m doing next.  I like this group, and I plan to stick with them for a while, but I don’t think I have a real direction yet in the company with how I can grow and be the most effective.  Here’s hoping that those questions get answered soon.

Another side of things to consider is that I’ve been back from my global adventure for 15 months now.  Crazy to think it’s gone by so fast.  My five months of traveling the South Pacific seems to of been forever ago and I’m definitely feeling the itch to explore some more.  My finances when I returned were pretty dry, and working here has helped a lot in that department to stabalize me once again and allow me to do some smaller trips.  I think the most important thing to focus on now is to keep paying off debt, do some smaller trips, and then figure out how I can get my foot on the road once again in another part of the world.