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Bicyclelicious.

Posted 14:22 CET Saturday August 21st, 2010 (13 days ago). 91 views. No comments. Tagged with Personal.

I’m not very good at bike maintenance, which means that I have to replace my bike every few years. It’s been a while since I last did it – and that time I had to do it because my previous bike was stolen. Now that once shiny new bike has turned into a hunk of junk. Over the years, I’ve replaced small parts, like the brake pads and stuff like that, but now the wear and tear of daily use, often all year through, made it necessary to replace some of the more vital bits and pieces.

After stopping by two bike shops to get estimates on the job, it turned out the frame was pretty much the only thing that didn’t have to be replaced, so in the end I opted for buying a new bike instead. It wasn’t that more expensive and riding this bike is like always having a tail wind pushing me in the back compared to the old one.

Since I don’t have any kids to show you pictures of here’s a picture of the bike. Continue reading "Bicyclelicious." →

Boot Camp.

Posted 21:06 CET Wednesday August 11th, 2010 (23 days ago). 180 views. 4 comments. Tagged with Personal, Work.

The BEKK boot camp at Lyngørporten is slowly crawling to an end. After a few days with various lectures, we’re now roughly a day away from finishing work on our assigned case; putting together an application that can be used internally for recruiting new employees. Everything is of course agile, with Scrum as our software development framework/pattern/whatever (pick your poison). Add Struts2, Spring, Hibernate, JPA and mix everything together with the help of Test Driven Development and you have the perfect recipe for a state-of-the-art recruiting application.

Or maybe not.

The Scrum sprints are compressed down to a single work day, and it turned out that the product owner didn’t know much about the project when we started. We got a technical specification before our initial meeting with the product owner, but it was all lies. All lies, I tell you! In retrospect we most likely could have turned this to our advantage and tried to “help” the product owner to understand his real requirements, but of course everything looks all too clear in hindsight. Well, we live and learn – that’s probably the point of the boot camp.

But not all is hard work here down South of Norway! Continue reading "Boot Camp." →

Career Change.

Posted 22:34 CET Wednesday August 4th, 2010 (30 days ago). 231 views. 7 comments. Tagged with Personal, Work.

Around this time last year, I started working for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, the NRK. Again. I also worked there from 2003 to 2004, before I left with Espen and Ola to found Rubberduck Media Lab, a company that turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. As you probably understand from the title of this entry, things are about to change again. On September 3, I’m leaving NRK to pursue a career as a senior system development consultant with the Norwegian company Bekk Consulting AS.

I have no doubt that it will be a very different and quite challenging task. I’ve received some information about the first project I will be involved in and I’m joining some of the most experienced consultants BEKK employs – maybe they needed someone to make them coffee. I can do that! We’re supposed to rewrite a web application to enable the use of more lightweight and modern application servers and frameworks. Hopefully, I can contribute to that as well.

BEKK is currently in the process of employing a batch of new consultants – none of them women – and I’m spending most of my summer vacation with them to learn the ins and outs of the company. Yesterday and today we’ve been through the administration basics and an introduction to .NET. Being a dedicated Java developer, I felt a bit dirty when we were done. Tomorrow morning we’re going underground for 8 days in an orgy* of team building, business cases and physical education.

*The use of the word “orgy” here is not literal, it’s very, very figurative.

Vacation.

Posted 23:09 CET Monday August 2nd, 2010 (32 days ago). 184 views. 5 comments. Tagged with Personal.

Ah, summer vacation. I’ve had my first week, where Anniken and I have spent two days with my family and friends back home and the weekend in Bodø for a wedding. We didn’t see any polar bears and it was too far south for the midnight sun this time of year, but the wedding and the boat trip with Nordlændingen in the wind and the rain was excellent. Plus how can old colleagues from Rubberduck and an open bar possibly fail? It can’t.

Yesterday we moved a car load of Anniken’s stuff to my our apartment. There are more cushions in the living room now than I thought possible. The number of pink objects in the apartment has also increased considerably over the last few months. Thankfully, I’ve been able to negotiate a deal where I will still be master of my own tiny domain; the two tables with my computer gear. Don’t get me wrong, though, I really enjoy both the subtle and not so subtle changes. Now official being two people living in the apartment feels great.

South and Back Again.

Posted 20:36 CET Thursday July 22nd, 2010 (43 days ago). 167 views. No comments. Tagged with Personal, Site News.

Last weekend me and Anniken joined two of her friends and their boyfriends and met at a cabin in Grimstad. I lived there (not in the cabin, but in the city) for three years while studying to get my Bachelor’s degree in computer science. A small, nice town littered with students and local heroes looking for students to beat up.

Going back was nice. Even though there are now 9 years since I left, it mostly looked the same. The pub/night club where we used to hang out every now and then had been demolished because the owners wanted to build a hotel. Unfortunately, they’d forgotten all about getting the right permits for building a hotel and when they finally applied they didn’t get them. They used to have a night club, now they have parking space. Continue reading "South and Back Again." →