Matt Down Under

Good news everyone! I got a new job in Hobart at an international company that sells tourism products in Australia and Canada. From this week on I am the new Senior Web Developer and responsible for about 15 existing websites, for design, further development, optimisation and the creation of new websites. It’s a full time job with an amazing perspective, they want to keep me as long as possible and even offered me an employer sponsorship to get a permanent resident visa.

This means an incredible chance for me, it is the perfect step into the Australian media and IT business and I am simply happy because I have a lot of responsibility and people in my office are very nice. I will do the work that I like to do, working with website development and graphics design with a lot of freedom to realise my own ideas and the opportunity to learn new technologies, but this time it’s on a higher level in a real business environment. I will work a lot with the Joomla CMS, template creation and web 2.0 frameworks, pretty interesting and sophisticated stuff.

Just imagine what this job could mean to me. Not only do I have an impressive salary (for my first job) that will help me recover from the first six months in Australia, I’m also based in Hobart, a very nice city especially in summer. I will get a lot of experience and have the chance to gain a good reputation by delivering good work and hopefully my application for a resident visa will speed up as well. Now I can claim that I have a job offer from a Tasmanian company (or at least one of their offices is in Tasmania), I will eventually get more points and I can be pretty sure to get a nomination for migration from the state government. They will probably want to support their local business by all means and my boss already promised me to help me by writing letters or talking to them if necessary. That’s awesome and it gives me a lot of confidence.

Did I mention my manager likes Apple products? ;) My first day at work was pretty funny because during my job interview some weeks ago I was told that I would have to work with a Windows PC. I told him that I won’t have a problem with that, but a Mac would improve my workflow and mood dramatically ;). When I arrived at the office on the first day I was a bit early and talked to my fellow employees. I found out that a brand new computer will be purchased for me and I could choose what hardware I’d like to have. Once again I suggested buying a Mac instead and after comparing prizes and getting a confirmation from Roger, our IT guy, that it will work in our Windows network environment, my boss and I went to the city to get some quotes for a new iMac. Outstanding, he even offered me the 24 inch iMac or Mac Pro if I liked to, but I said the 20 inch iMac would be enough for my needs. In Germany I had a 20 inch iMac as well and I always felt it was big and fast enough. I’m very pleased to get a Mac at all, I don’t need a high-end model for web development.

So in the next few days a sexy new iMac will arrive and take place on my desk. I’m really excited if that will start some sort of corporate migration to Apple computers once again. Last year I was working at a media agency in Stuttgart (Germany) for a couple of months. I always used my 12 inch Powerbook for work and everyone else had to use ugly PCs and Thinkpad notebooks. Lots of people kept asking me about that shiny little Apple laptop I was using and then they went to the manager and asked him to order some MacBook Pros. By the time I left that company almost everyone was using OS X on a MacBook Pro, pretty funny. Face the truth, Windows sucks ;), but most people are simply used to dealing with Windows problems for so many years that they cannot imagine a system that is actually working, easy to use and just beautiful.

Ok you probably noticed my mood has improved a lot and that I have a really good feeling about this job. Let’s just hope it doesn’t happen like in the first six months I had in Australia, six beautiful weeks followed by a nightmare.

Oh by the way, I am staying at a hostel that is just across the street from my office, maybe 50m distance, I don’t know. So I can leave my room at 8.29am and at 8.30am I’m in my office ;). The owner of the hostel also owns the Arthouse in Launceston where I was staying before, so he knows me for quite some time already. I got my own private room and the rent is less than I paid in Launceston, pretty cool. He even offered me free accomodation in exchange for doing some webdesign work for the hostel websites…

Looks like this is going to become one of the best weeks I had so far in Australia. And after playing around with the new iPhone 3G at the Apple store yesterday I’m pretty sure to invest one of my first paychecks in this beautiful gadget. MacBook Air, iMac and iPhone 3G, the perfect working environment, what else does a man need to be happy and productive? ;) Now I need to find a way how to keep them all syncronised…

Peace out.