I was just called over by Ken and Grant to help them with a problem that they were having with the unittest/Mox test suite that they were putting together, written ahead of the functional code. I feel so proud.

Welcome to the Guardian, Simon! I only wish I'd still be there when you started, but I'll be gone by then. :-(

BBC's Today Programme shutters message board. Watch this space...

The good news; the new Guardian Sport and Football sites were launched successfully, and seem to be working fine. The bad news; 24 hour licensing notwithstanding, we couldn't find anywhere to serve us a beer at two in the morning. Grrr.

Update: More on the new sites here; Our new look.

Looks like I've been outed.

The Guardian wins the website of the year award at the British Press Awards. Well done us. There will be cake today. ;-)

Fingers crossed for the webbies...

Oh, and some people appreciate the fine details, too.

This old post of mine has an old-style Guardian URL in one of its comments. Click on it, and you'll end up at a new style URL.

Not much to see, I'll admit, but I'm pleased - Matt and I made that happen.

Where's your "I've got a new Mac, and it's lovely" post, Matt?

Thanks to Jay for pointing out this rant, via reddit.

Now, I'm sorry they guy can't get a job, but if this is his attitude, I can't say I'm surprised. He's burned his bridges with ThoughtWorks, for a start. ;-)

Disclaimer - I work for ThoughtWorks. But I can say that with perfect honestly that his impression of TW doesn't mesh with mine. Thing is, he seems to think that what TW sells is platform expertise. It's not. We primarily sell smart people. (Oh, and me, too.) A smart person will pick up a new platform quickly. If that's not possible with Rails, that that's Rail's problem - not that I believe that to be the case. Yes, you do need a cadre of people with platform experience for a project to succeed, but not the whole team. (Perhaps he'd have better luck job hunting if he didn't restrict himself exclusively to Rails?)

He says that TW leaves bad code bases behind. Again, in my limited experience, that's not true at all. TWers seem to care deeply about what they do. Anyone else out there who doesn't work for TW who has any experiences they'd care to hare?

Also, his dismissal of TDD and agile practices such as pair programming suggests to me that he's not really tried them. We at TW have a lot of experience in these areas, and it all works just fine for us. If he claims to have improved productivity by dropping them, then he's clearly not comparing like-for-like. Done properly, I fervently believe that these practices improve productivity in the long term (if not in the short term).

I do wish we used more Django and less Rails, though. ;-)

I won a shiny new 60GB PS3 at the ThoughtWorks Christmas party last night. Class - well worth the hangover. Whether it's worth the memory of all that nerd-dancing, well, I'm not so sure.

Anyway, not really being much of a gamer, I need some advice. Which games should I get, and which should I avoid? I'm into FPSs, strategy games and RPGs, and I'm not into platformers or sport sims.

I've already spent £200 on games and accessories in my head...

What if powerful languages and idioms only work for small teams? (via Small teams and big jobs) is interesting. We are running a really large Agile project here at GU; what, 60 odd people? Mention any of the road bumps you hit, and people tell you your team's too large.

That's no good. The team, and the project, are the size they need to be. Splitting them arbitrarily might be possible, but it would carry huge costs of its own. The challenge is to make agile work with a big team. And on the whole, I think we are.

Interestingly, despite the fact that we've made agile methodologies scale up, some people here are still nervous about whether agile languages can do the same. Plus ca change...

ThoughtWorks had a few Dell 926 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/card-readers given to them, so they decided to raffle them off. I won one, but I had to throw the fish back - turns out it's a Windows only machine. Windows only! Naturally, I won't have Windows in the house, and I don't know anyone who uses Windows, either.

Well, at least I won't admit to knowing that class of person. ;-)

It's uncanny. Whenever there's a raffle with a prize I don't want, I win every time, without fail. That's proper ironic, Alanis.

ThoughtWorks have given me the go-ahead to organise another Python meetup at the London office. Thanks, guys!

Details here - London Python meetup, Wednesday, December the 5th.

... here - launched this morning.

Those Reuters feeds weren't as simple as they look.

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. ;-)

Very busy with induction stuff today. I needed to get it all sorted, 'cos I start on a client site tomorrow! They don't hang about.

They've given me a horrid brick of a Dell to use. Well, to be fair, pre-Mac, I would have thought it was fine. But once you've experienced Mac, nothing else compares... And I have about a squillion user IDs to remember.

Everyone seems friendly, which is more than can be said for Lotus Notes...

I have my ThoughtWorks start date - The 19th of March. I've really got that starting-big-school feeling now. ;-) In the meantime, I have to:

• Transfer my extensive library of Technical books home. Two or three a day should do it. Dunno where I'm going to keep them all, though... I already have as many bookshelves as my tiny flat can take, and they are all already full - two deep in most cases. Sigh.
• Get myself a MacBook - a black 2.0GHz model, up-spec'ed to 2GB RAM and 160GB HD. Nice!
• Renew my season ticket. £1096! And unfortunately, ThoughtWorks don't offer season ticket loans, presumably 'cos being a consulting gig my work travel costs will all be on expenses. But that doesn't work for me - annual season tickets entitle you to cheap mainline train tickets, too, and I save a fortune picking the girls up from Reading at the weekend with mine. It's still cheaper to get an annual season ticket, even if that's all I use it for!
• Oh yes, get a new laptop bag, too.
• Thoughtworkers - do I need a new suit, too?

Expensive. :-(

Part of my role is going to be mentoring, so Helping people make changes is a worthwhile read.

No, I'm not talking about the bloody operating system. I wouldn't touch that with a rolled up copy of the Mail.

No, it's a work thing. This morning, I handed in my notice, and in a month or so (exact date TBC) I'll be starting at ThoughtWorks.

Exciting, and a bit scary. I'm looking forward to working with the ThoughtWorkers - I think I'll really learn a lot. It's going to be a struggle to keep up.

But I've been with my current employers for a long time, and it's a wrench to leave. The people are lovely on the whole, and I've really enjoyed my time here, but I do need to move on if I'm to keep learning at the rate I want to.

Update: Oh, and congratulations to Andy, too.

Further update: I'll be having a swift celebratory half in The Light, Shoreditch this evening. All welcome.