software house

For me, lots of projects have some degree of grind or frustration or irritation. There’s not one project I could point to and say that was just delicious through and through. I think Agile sets out to solve a big bunch of problems, but I think there’s something underlying that set of problems. There’s something about western culture that trains them not to do certain things. If I do something that of that smell or feel, there’ll be a big wrongness coming my way. People slowly learn not to do certain things.

Yeah, we did one self-organising project, we were working under the mantra of better software faster. The idea was quality and speed, better software faster, yeah, brill. I would reckon we could double the speed just by going faster. The theory was that we could get twice the performance out of the team by doing it faster, just by sorting out all the little problems.

I remember the first Java project we got put on, that was amazing. It was a team of four devs. We were producing set top box software, so it was almost J2ME, highly embedded. We wrote all the code using VIM and we used Win-CVS. We just checked out the code and we checked it back in again. We resolved the mergers between us and all using the same code base; no branches, nothing funny. The simplest project imaginable. We had some really just stupid rules in that company, like every line of code should have a comment. I remember doing full Java docs for every single method I wrote and just going: it’s just so obvious, why can’t we just miss it out for this one? But we weren’t allowed to because of the company policy.

I remember distinctly going to my team leader: I didn’t understand the design document I’d been given and I was trying to get somebody to explain it to me. They said they’d get back to me when they had time and I should get on with what I thought was right and so I did. Then I went back to him a month later, and said “Look I still don’t know what I’m doing here. This is what I’m doing, can you at least confirm that this is right?” And they went, “Er, I’ll look at it.”

I didn’t get anything back until I actually went to the Project Head and it’s 70 people to a project and I was pretty junior, so I was a bit nervous, I said “Well, look I’m just trying to find out whether I’m doing the right thing.” And he went, “Sure, I’ll look at it.”

I joined a local software house and I was there for five years. For three of those years I was stuck in the basement doing VB (and I didn’t like VB). I wasn’t getting too well with one of my leaders, with looking for feedback and not getting it basically, with the usual result. The environment was very bad for my health, my eyesight, my optician recommended I get out of there. So I taught myself Java, because I realised it was quite heavily in demand in the industry and the software house had hardly any Java coders. And then I told some people that I’d learnt Java. Apparently there were abou