Note: This was a full time gig, not a consulting gig. However, I took the job with future consulting in mind as you’ll see.

When I interviewed at workday, I was actually planning to reboot my consulting career. I was planning to work with a consulting shop for a bit, then break off on my own, but instead a friend convinced me to come check out Workday. Boy, am I glad I did.

The thing that the interview proved to me was that Workday was pushing the technology envelope in so many ways. I can’t even begin to explain it here, but here’s a brief writeup on just the Flex stuff that I worked on while I was there. I played a supporting role as most of the architecture was in place before I arrived. However, I knew that if I could wrap my head around what it was Workday was doing in their UI generation, then every other project that I could come across afterwards would be simple. I was right and 5 years later, that still has proven true.

Workday proved to me that with enough foresight, you can accomplish pretty amazing things. I always liked to build dynamic UIs that take their form from the underlying data vs predesigned screens, but Workday took that thought to a whole new level. It proved to me that component based architectures truly scale in ways that no other architectures can. That’s why I’m so excited about Montage, an HTML5 application framework that’s has an amazing component model.

As a consultant, it’s hard to make the switch to a full time employee. However, full time employment stints (at least for me) have been places where I can walk away with something that has made me a better programmer and, oft times, a better person. Workday definitely fits that bill.