I've finished one leg of my journey at Oakton www.oakton.com.au and have decided to return to my old company www.ssw.com.au to continue my consultant dream.

The reasons are long and numerous, but I'd just say that the biggest factor is there was a really good situation for me and I grabbed it before the window of opportunity disappeared.

In a sense I feel I've learned a lot in the three years I've spent wandering around in the wilderness, I've experienced:

• Product development - where I'm not doing consultant work
• Contract work - where there's excellent money but difficult career progression, or choice of technology
• Working with teams on different time zones
• Big team development - working in a 20-man team is fun too, but with lots of draw backs.
• I've worked with proper BA now.  Finally!  Big thank you to the Vero BA's, you know who you are, wherever you are now.
• Big complex organisations
• Enterprise level projects
• I nearly jumped in with a startup and would have definitely done some fun stuff, but I just don't know if I'm ready to settle down on one project

But some things remains the same

• Agile rocks
• Waterfall flops
• Unit-testing is great
• But hard to do in a web app
• Windows application is sweet
• Until you gotta deploy

(Thanks to Dinesh for fixing the rhyme on "flops" for me - second line)

I leave my old colleagues with what I've always firmly believed consultants do

• We work hard, we write good code, and at the end of the day, the clients are happy and we are happy.

So with a happy fondness for all the great memories, I bid my old colleagues farewell for now.