I went to both interviews -- the recruiter and the hiring company -- and both were good experiences. The recruiter is a decent chap and gave me honest feedback and good advice. He will keep me in his list but does not have anything that is a good match at the moment.

The interview with the hiring company (Quotient) also went well. This was the first interview in which I was excited about the opportunity! They have a lot of technologies and a dynamic environment. The latter can be a good thing or a bad thing -- it means that their plans change as conditions around them change. Changes could be caused by a new contract, a change to requirements for an existing contract, or maybe something else. It won't be the stodgy "arrive at 8:00, sit at your desk and perform the planned tasks, and leave at 5:00" work of the nineteen-fifties.

Quotient builds a lot of web applications and uses various content management systems. Many of their technology choices are dictated by their clients; clients hire them to modify or expand existing systems, and Quotient works within the existing set of tools and technologies. Which means that one client may be using the Microsoft stack (Windows, IIS, ASP.NET, and SQL Server), another client may be using an open-source stack (Linux, Apache, JSP, and MySQL), and a third client may be using a hybrid stack (Windows, Apache, PHP, and SQL Server). Flexibility is important for them.

Today I will invest some time in Perl and the database manipulation script. I'm working with text files first; later I will use Perl/DBI and talk to a MySQL database.