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Today I wore my Threadless “Stop destroying our planet. It’s where I keep all my stuff” T-shirt to work. Somewhat risky, perhaps, to show up at work in a politically motivated (although funneh) piece of clothing when you don’t really know the people you are working with. Still it could have been so much worse*.

Everything went better than expected, of course. The project manager noticed the text and suddenly we were having an interesting discussion about the environment. It turns out he has both bought allowances in the European Union Emission Trading Scheme and he and his girlfriend have introduced two vegetarian dinners per week at home. Interesting.

Interesting, indeed. Continue reading "Footprint." →

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." →

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.