Life is like the ocean eternally washing the sandy shore.  A wave approaches, crests, crashes, then rolls up onto the beach to then gently release its energy and finally fall back into the tide, another right on its heels.  I find waves of intensity ebbing in my personal and professional life all the time.  Sometimes things are building up, gaining intensity, sometimes they are playing out on a turbulent ride toward completion. 

The last four months I've been work-focused on designing and releasing a new Rentals.com.  It will be out Tuesday, August 1st if all goes perfectly.  If not, it will be shortly after.  Regardless, there will be a series of releases to increment the planned initial functionality.  The new site replaces a site that's been successful for a number of years but hasn't been allowed to reach its potential.  We're going to leverage the strong capabilities of the software that Phil Massum designed and drive a new website that I've adapted from the work of a recent redesign of ApartmentGuide.com.  For that project, I had collaborated (as architect) with Roman Pozdniakov (technical lead), Mark Stevens (project lead) and Blane Davis (data manager and seach guru) to leverage the capabilities of our Endeca search tool in order to satisfy the complicated business requirements surrounding large apartment community listing service.  Rentals.com will take advantage of an indirect client relationship to provide a more rich and valuable user experience with a focus on search indexable navigation.   We've designed the search engine spider bait and trap to be exactly the same thing, just like they've suggested.  I navigated the site using an alternative browser and I was surprised by how useful it actually is.  I was pleased by how terrible the competition was.  I can't wait to see what happens when its released into the wild.

Its been a challenging and rewarding project and has lead to a promotion to product development manager.  I now oversee product and project development for all things apartments at consumer source inc.  That includes ApartmentGuide.com and Rentals.com as well as content management applications, support applications, integration and future new/aquired product.  I'm hoping to help coach teams to be self organizing, self managing and self motivated.  This move is outside my immediate comfort zone and represents the first time in a long time that I've taken on a new role that wasn't something I was infinitely trained for.  There's a lot of disfunction to resolve and I'll be learning on the fly, having to stretch my own capacity to accomplish my goals.  Its due time I stop resting on my laurels.

We've been redefining our process to adhere to agile methodologies and principles and working toward more responsive, less cumbersome software development.  This is as exciting as the product itself and my passion for it has surprised me as much as my discovery a number of years ago that I LOVE database normalization and the inherent relationship of structured information.  These two concepts, adaptation and data relationships, take a new direction when considered independently and lead to ideas that are just beginning to reveal potential.  The crest of the Rentals.com release has just flattened onto the sand and the next one is beginning to swell. 

On the subject of waves and beaches, I just returned from a weekend at Sea Pines on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. The place is amazing.  Its very high end.  While I appreciated the wealth of the place, I found myself longing for the more personal Rosemary Beach.  I feel more at home away from home there then I did inside the security gate of the Sea Pines rich person compound.  There's nothing wrong with having money but I feel that it doesn't matter whether the uniformed guard waves you in or drags you in, you're no longer in the land of liberty and diversity; you're inside the prison wall. If you stay too long, you'll become institutionalized.  However, if you instead retreat inside yourself, and listen to the waves coming in rows, the waves all become one sound: like the wind but much louder.  You might realize that those waves are just ripples on top of some larger wave unfolding.  If you can focus on that wave and become curious as to how it might soon crest and play out, you might forget about walls all together.  You might realize that they are not a prison at all.  You might relax and enjoy the moment.  You might forget about the next wave swelling on the sand bar long enough to catch your breath and enjoy the ocean air.  I clearly need more vacations.