medium sized organization

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.

It’s just a basic engineering problem. When you have more than one person working on the team they will end up making changes in the same file, use the same function, or in another object using another object in a critical way. And things are going break unless they are disciplined in their approach. I think this is a problem that basically generally people haven’t got a clue how to share code. That’s what we had there. A usual thing was that someone would stand up and go, “Okay, who’s changed such and such?” with, you know, “You Muppet” going unsaid.

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 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