Today was my last day at HP, the end of a two-year internship. Starting Thursday, I’ll be working at a local company on their Java/open source team, and I think my first project will deal with PHP. I’m excited to start a new job, and am looking forward to doing something different on a daily basis than what I was doing at HP. Leaving HP wasn’t my original goal, and I started back in February trying to get a regular-employee position there, but it just never happened. They were in a hiring freeze and despite my manager’s efforts, they never got me an offer letter.

Fortunately, after going through lots of interviews, I got offer letters from four companies for programming positions. I think I made a good choice in terms of the variety of work I’ll have, the stability of the company, the salary and benefits, and the work environment. I had some awesome times at HP and it was a really good internship; I met many cool, smart people. Hopefully, the new company will be just as fulfilling to me. I already know one guy who works there, who actually recently left HP, too. I met several employees when I interviewed with them, and they all seemed nice. My manager seems laid-back and I think we’ll get along well.

One thing that I think will be nice is that I’m going to work with languages and frameworks we never used at HP. I haven’t done PHP for some time, except the little Wordpress stuff I do for this blog, and we never used it in my area at HP. Likewise if I do Java, because I never used it at HP, either. It’s a contracting company, so I should have different work after a few months, which suits me because I like having a whole slew of different projects to work on.