Being Thankful
Yeah, lots happening these days. Lots. Let’s back up a bit.
On the work front. At the start of September (I think) I was asked to be a tech lead for this MasterCard project. This would involve leading a team of three developers through a four week sprint to get a relatively small and easily understood project done. It would also involve being on-site. I decided that I liked the challenge and accepted. Besides, I don’t like backing down from a challenge, so there’s that.
The experience was most – enlightening. First off, the client decided to pull me off the project in order to draft two design documents for them. We added another member to the team to make up for my absence and crossed our fingers. It didn’t work out well. One member of my team was a pretty good stand-in tech lead, but my absence coupled with adding another member in the middle combined with our newness as a team to spell about a 2 week delivery delay on a 4 week project. This was not good at all. And we only pulled this off by working crazy hours. There’s a whole laundry list of lessons learned, but I’ll save that for another blog.
We started the next project for the same group. We were already a week behind schedule and I was finishing up the second of those two design docs. But the guys stepped up and we finished one of the two projects on time. The other project came in late (in fact it still may have one outstanding issue). This caused a lot of tension. We are about to start the next project with another group. Armed with our lessons learned I think we’ll have a better experience.
On the personal project front. I’ve been playing with a bunch of new (to me) technologies. From Grails to Erlang to Flex to the Mint distro and Git. I’m enjoying it very much, and hopefully somewhere in there is something which will keep me employed later. That’s the thing about being a software guy; you have to keep learning or you get stuck – and sometimes getting stuck is manageable, but sometimes it’s not. So, functional programming, dynamically-typed languages and UI description technologies like Flex and Griffon is where I’m currently concentrating my attention.Oh, and I’m incorporating some agile/scrum techniques into my own life. So, there’s that.
Thanksgiving came and went with little fanfare – though I am quite thankful for my life. For lots of things, really. I went to visit my parents a couple weekends ago (late due to work). Oh, I picked up Portal 2 – fun stuff right there.
And on the personal front. I don’t know who reads this blog anymore – I moved it a couple years ago without telling anyone and my blogs.bifrostbridge.com redirect no longer works, so it might just be me and Scott J (Hi Scott). But, and this is very, very preliminary, Karen is, at this very moment, pregnant. Which means sometime before next fall I could be a Dad. Which is pretty amazing. So, there’s that. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.
