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On Transparency

by Kofi Sarfo 1. October 2009 18:39

Today, a courier cyclist arrived bearing the gift of a new contract for new employment. If everything goes as expected we'll be working in the City within two weeks.

It's perhaps better not to mention the employer by name but they're a solutions provider working within an interesting area of finance and our role's likely to involve helping to ensure the reliability of systems processing terrabytes of data with issues of cleanliness and performance being most important. We're thinking optimised data querying, concurrency (scale) and transformation/calculation.

Without much recent UI experience all the cool Winforms & Web developer roles seemed out of reach so this is where our spare time needs to be invested over the next couple of years whilst the day job is all about the data, touching possibly on F# and elements of grid computing and much more of the modelling languages: UML & XML.

In terms of development approach the experience from the last consultancy role at Man Investments should prove invaluable in terms of transferring agile methodology and process where appropriate but because this is a smaller company, enterprise systems integration complexity ought not to present the same kind of challenges. I'm hoping for a more contained, bounded, intra-application kinda complexity. Those woods and trees managed to get quite blurred in that last assignment.

The new mission is to help provide Market Transparency.

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Interviewing

Comments (3) -

Anon

10/8/2009 5:31:58 AM #

Hi,

Well done for finally getting a new contract. Sounds an interesting place. If you have any stand up meetings, remember to refer to yourself as "I" and not "we". You dont want to be scaring people ;o)

No, seriously. Congrats. From your posts it sounds like you had a tough time finding a new contract. Hope it all works out.

kofisarfo

10/15/2009 3:50:42 PM #

It is a contract but I'm not contracting... if you know what I mean. Those dreaded words, "gone permanent".

So far there's not much evidence of the agile at this new shop so it will be interesting to see if I'm allowed to introduce some. I'm not sure yet how to go about suggesting stand-up meetings as it doesn't appear to be that sort of place. The people immediately above seem keen on improvement and adopting new technology where appropriate so that's encouraging.

I didn't have a particularly difficult time scoring a new contract -- but for a few weeks holiday in Italy scheduled for July/August.

Have any experience agile evangelising?

Anon

10/21/2009 7:17:57 AM #

I am probably not the best person to advise on agile evangelising. Dont get me wrong, I think it has its place. I just dont agree its the best thing since sliced bread.

With regards to stand up meetings. Whether I stand or sit down makes no difference. The argument that if its a stand up one then its quick and to the point? Wrong. We had one yesterday and it was no quicker or to the point than when we sit down. Surely the main point is actually how you conduct it, not your physical position. Although I do appreciate people hate standing for too long. But many people hate meetings in general. So my advice sit or stand, but keep the meeting on track and avoid tangents.

Dont be silly and try establish yourself as someone who doesnt agree with how it currently works. Do it slowly. Start with small steps. Settle in and gain your colleagues respect first, then start trying to introduce small changes that dont offend or insult existing methods.

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On Transparency

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