After spending a few years at Fidelity Investments in Boston, I was getting a bit worn down from the drive. Technically, it is not far by distance. It was only about 35 miles from southern New Hampshire into the city, but the traffic was unbelievable. It took me 6 hours sometimes to get home in the snow.

It was also closing in on the end of the 90s, and the big talk was about Y2K, the term for the apocalypse of the year 2000. I was running a lot of tests while building the code, which I had completed all my tools for, and created a pretty automated continuous build and delivery, which is the fancy name CI/CD, now continuous integration and continuous delivery. I guess old is new again.

With the drive and the taxes of Massachusetts, while living in New Hampshire. Also, now well established in my field, I wanted to stay in Fidelity but get back to New Hampshire, and as luck would have it, they had a large presence in Merrimack, New Hampshire, about the same distance from my home as Boston, but no state tax, which was great and an instant raise.

From a work perspective, it was a new and better learning experience: they needed someone to fix their source control system, and I, as the senior person coming in, had the opportunity to establish better use of ClearCase, which was the industry standard at the time. Also, as a lead in function, not title yet, I had junior people looking to me in a management capacity.

This new opportunity will consume me for the next six years, lead me deeper into the management field while staying technical, but also throw me a life-altering event, which seemed catastrophic given I was getting a bit older, but led to the best possible outcome and opportunity

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