I was only in the ThoughtWorks office for a day - I started at my first client on day two. No faffing around!
I'm now working at a large media company, the name of which would be quite familiar to anyone in the UK. No, it's not The Mail. ;-) The system I'm working on is basically the mother of all web CMSs. Makes a nice change from all the financial systems I've worked on for the last, err, twenty odd years, God help me.
Nice to work on a really big system, too. They need to serve at least 250 complex pages per second, sustained. I'm sure I'll learn a huge amount about scaling.
There's a lot of other stuff that's new to me, too. They pair all the time. On my first day, I knocked up a simple path manipulation method or two on my own one lunchtime, and when I mentioned it, they looked at me as if I'd just admitted a taste for necrophilia. I shan't be doing that again. More on pairing later - it's a big subject.
Iterations are only a week long, and with a largish (40+) team, it'll be interesting to see how that works. I've not really seen the whole system in operation yet - there was an implementation last week, which I gather threw things off a bit, and I had a half day at the end of last week's delivery.
With that size of team, big scrum style meeting are obviously out of the question, but there's a whole team stand-up at ten each day, at which you only speak if you have something to say that everyone needs to hear, followed by a more scrum like sub-team meeting. I'm in the pink team - very metrosexual. Each sub-team has its own dedicated business analyst and QA person. No more writing my own Selenium tests!
They - they, err, sorry, we, do just about all project management using index cards - no XPlanner or the like. Hope not too many get lost! They only software system the developers have is an ill-used Wiki.
Hours are ten 'till six, which is strange to me, but perfectly normal in the newspaper game, I'm told. Margo would love it!
The tool in use are mostly things I'm pretty familiar with - Java, Eclipse, Subversion, Spring, Hibernate, jUnit, the usual suspects. We use Velocity for templating, though, and Oracle as a back end, so there's techie stuff to learn.
No Python - yet. ;-)
All the development boxes are Windows, I'm afraid, though people are able to build the system on their Macs and Linux boxen.
Good news is I have a Notes client for my Mac now. It's still horrid, but at least I can leave the Dell brick at home.
I don't have a desk of my own, which I really don't like much, but that's life as a hired gun, I suppose.
Oh - and they have a nice, healthy canteen, so I hope my dietary habits will improve a bit.
Last thing - I'm off for "Immersion Training" in May - two weeks in Bangalore. Should be a blast.
Err, that's it. ;-)
Posted to ThoughtWorks by Simon Brunning at March 26, 2007 08:29 PMOK, I'm fairly certain that I know where you're working so I reckon we can still do drinks one night.
Just not in that evil pub that tried to ruin my jacket!
You think Bangalore is bad, we're being shipped off to Hammersmith in May, for good.
So best to do drinks soon while we still can.
Next few weeks are busy though, some time after Easter I reckon.
I'd be very interested to know how XP works in that environment: large-ish team, and I'm sure, many dependencies on other parts of the organisation.
Pairing has been the source of much debate in my corner of the world. What do you think of it?
"God help me." lol. oh, what a card!
re: "Immersion Training" - the XP baptism.
Posted by: Dave Pinn on March 26, 2007 10:21 PMNot fair! I want to go to India!
Sounds pretty full on your new job. Haven't heard a peep from u!
Still on for dinner on Wednesday?
Posted by: Tulna on March 26, 2007 10:43 PMI'm looking forward to hearing how it all works.
Tulna: you'd break under the pressure of pairing
Posted by: elp on March 27, 2007 09:10 AMHave a great time in Bangalore. I was there a couple of years ago. The clubs and bars are great, which is not really what you'd expect. The atmosphere reminded me of Hong Kong.
From the small world department, I was due at a party in the Tup on Satruday night and would have seen you, but couldn't get back from the West End in time as the Charing Cross branch of the Northern Line was closed.
Posted by: Nick on March 27, 2007 09:56 AMI'm pretty sure I know where you're working. I've done a couple of stints of contracting there and they're a great bunch of people. And the XP stuff seems to work really well for them.
I don't think you'll find any Python there. When they want a dynamic language they all tend to reach for Perl (which is largely why I was there I suppose).
You're lucky to be working exclusively on the new system. The current system involves programming in TCL!
Have fun.
Posted by: Dave Cross on March 27, 2007 09:56 AMPairing rocks when you're with nice people. Much more productive, but partially becasue it's harder to go call th eplumber or look up ebay all the time :-)
Week long iterations are pretty hectic (we just changed from 1 to 2 weeks) and good luck breaking all your stires down to a maximum of one pair week of story units/bananas.
I'm very interested in terms of how it works in a large team - we have 10 developers and unless we re-pair each day (one person staying on each story for continuity) it's easy to lose information.
Good luck. You'll need it if you think your diet will emprove by itself. maybe you can talk to katherine about pretending you ever intend to do some exercise ;-)
Enjoy
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