Onwards And Upwards

I’ve been a bit quiet for that last couple of weeks as I’ve been in the process of applying for a new job. After 2 years at Harper Adams University College, I’ve regrettably decided to move on. I’ve really enjoyed working on campus albeit on the fringes. The students make this place. They are the college. They inject all the energy into the place, as well as the occasional high-jinx driven destruction!

I was secretly yearning to get back into a feature-driven development team environment but although I wasn’t actively looking but I got a call via Linked-In from an old buddy of mine. I knew him socially but neither of us new that we were both developers. His firm was recruiting .NET developers, and after a night in our local pub discussing the role, I speculatively e-mailed my CV.

The rest as they say, is history. After two interviews including a technical test, I start at my new firm next month and can’t wait. Did I mention that I’d be working from home? Right up my street…literally!

I’m a strong believer in drawing positives from any situation and there are more than enough positives and strengths that I’m leaving this role with.  My ability to construct a sentence with a high acronym factor has increase ten-fold having gained a wider appreciation of CI, SVN, TDD, IOC and DI!  I also spend more time thinking about what design pattern could fit a problem now, rather than just spinning any old solution up. I can only hope that this will assist my replacement :-)

The most important thing I’ve come to realise is the value of face-to-face time with the customer and the fact that that nothing helps you scope out what the customer wants’ more than a picture.  I released the last bit of functionality I’ll produce into OpenFields the other day. Prior to merging the feature branch into the trunk  and doing a live release, I got the stake holders in front of a screen and went through the completed feature with them. We’d “work shopped” this feature last week using Balsamiq Mockups so it was a bit of an anti-climax really, given that they saw exactly what they’d expected to see. No surprises. No Pain. Just a verbal acknowledgement that what they could see matched their requirements. 10 minutes later, the branch was merged and the feature was live. Cushty! Face to face time is like gold dust if everyone engages in it.

I’ll probably crawl back into my hole for a bit while I settle into my new job. I’m going to start playing with Mercurial and EF in the meantime so might tweet some stupid questions looking for some guidance in the meantime and if I stumble on any links for successful home working, Ill tweet them also.