I’m not so good at saying goodbyes, so the end of a long term project always brings me mixed feelings: I’m eager to take on something new, start afresh, meet new people, tackle new problems — but I hate saying goodbye to the team of people I’ve been working with so closely, people I’ve seen every working day of the week for so long. And as it happens, the project I’ve been on for the past twelve months is coming to a close ten days from now.

At one of the larger Dutch health insurance companies, we built, from scratch, a combined web/mainframe application for the new Dutch national health system (“basisverzekering” or basic insurance) that was introduced on January 1st. People were skeptic about our chances, but the project manager kept the faith and we pulled it off in time. Right now, when I walk past some call center employees (they’ve been cramped everywhere in the building, there’s so many calls coming in about the basisverzekering), it’s very satisfying to see them on the phone with actual clients, using the very application I helped build. So even though I’m happy to leave, I’m really not. I’m saying goodbyes.

Goodbye to the 8th floor where we sat, a huge empty office floor housing 80 people, all working on this project.
Goodbye to Chris, I really hope to see him back. He was our senior team member, who came from the UK to live in Holland some 25 years ago; still eager to do and learn new things at the age of 57. He was sadly diagnosed with cancer last September and had to leave the project early to be hospitalized. I wish him all the best, but he could probably use a miracle right now.
Goodbye to the girl with the blue sports car that she parked next to my car every morning at the train station; we never spoke because I was always running to catch my train, but I liked her car.
Goodbye to the mainframe and to Tuxedo and OptimalJ, all technical stuff to help the application store its data in a database; all those extra layers make it a lot more complex and more error-prone while developing, but it was also an extra challenge, it gave an edge to the project. I’ll be happy to use ‘just’ Oracle again in my next project.
Goodbye to the guys (and Kate) at Social Ground at the Amersfoort train station, where I bought a grande latte every morning; still the best coffee I can find. I hope they’ll open up another shop at my side of the country (East).
Goodbye to Remco, another member of the team, aka the friendly Ruby guru; he pointed me at Ruby among so much other things: del.icio.us, Bloglines, dEUS to name just a few. I’m on my own now, preaching Ruby to the Java people in my own office. I’ve already begun by bombarding my account manager with useful info about Ruby, like Obie Fernandez’ post on Productivity Arbitrage. He’s listening.
Goodbye to all the other members on the team. I learned a lot from you; that’s why I like doing projects like these.

I’m ready for the next project. Bring it on!

02-02-2007 UPDATE: Last night, I was finally able to say goodbye to Chris. I dreamed that the project was still running, everyone was there (not Remco of course, who’d left early to become a Rails programmer). We all had to work late to finish the release. Except Chris, who had already finished his part. It happened to be his last day on the project, so we all said goodbye to him. Someone convinced him to give a demo of what he had built. So he proudly showed us an oversized pocket calculator with a matrix printer built in, which could be used as a portable device to print invoices for clients on-site. It looked impressive. He pushed a few buttons and an invoice slip slowly rolled out. As he was walking to the door, a big grin on his face, I discovered that an entire group of line items was missing from the printed invoice. I wanted to call him back, but at that moment I woke up.

He must have reached his final destination by now.
Bye Chris!