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.
A Familiar Feeling.
Posted 22:34 CET Thursday November 26th, 2009 (281 days ago). 279 views. No comments. Tagged with Personal, Work.
I’ve now been an NRK-employee for a little over three months. It’s been an interesting ride so far, although there has been a lot of scratching ones head, thinking that maybe, just maybe I’d been more use if I’d staid in bed that day.
Thankfully, that’s getting better and there is less head scratching these days. We’ve been working on a rather ambitious project for a while now and with a little bit of luck, we might nail the deadline. At times I’ve even felt that I’ve actually been contributing, which is good. If I’d been my boss, however, I would probably have expected that I’d been more productive by now, but the platform I’m working on is just very complicated and intricate. Some parts of the code are clear as day, while others are slapped together by consultants without much love for documenting their art. That’s my excuse, at least, maybe I’m just getting old and slow.
Last week I had my first week where I didn’t work normal days in terms of hours. I didn’t work more than 60 hours, still there are three important differences compared to my previous job: First of all, 60+ hours was a normal work week in the mobile TV rat race. Secondly, the overtime I work now is paid overtime since it’s extra hours as a result of a deadline imposed by the management. Sounds like a good deal to me. And last but not least, over the three months I’ve been working, I’ve also accumulated about 40 hours of overtime that I won’t get paid for – instead I can take the 40 hours off from work, and get paid my normal wage.
If this is a dream, please don’t wake me up yet, because it’s a good dream.
With the exception of two days I’ve biked to and from work. All in all that’s a lot of biking, and the bike ride itself has gone from OK to boring to a state where I don’t really notice that I’m biking. I guess it’s the same way commuters feel. The main difference is that the commuters are stuck in the long line of cars I’m biking past. I laugh at them because they’re stuck, they laugh at me because it’s raining outside.
Lessons Learned the Hard Way.
Posted 17:31 CET Sunday October 11th, 2009 (327 days ago). 306 views. No comments. Tagged with Technology, Work.
I spent Thursday and Friday last week on an internal introductory course covering the ins and outs of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. Like all courses some of the lectures were interesting while some were… less interesting. I particularly enjoyed the tours of the TV and radio buildings and the main control room for all the TV channels. With its 3500 employees, NRK is a fairly large company on a Norwegian scale, but if you look at similar international companies it’s a drop in the media ocean: As an organization, NRK likes to compare itself to the BBC, which has so many people employed that the number is not even available anywhere on the internet.
One of the most interesting things I learned, however, was not about NRK per se, but about a project that’s currently in development. I’m not sure if the project details are publicly available information or not and I vaguely remember something about a non disclosure agreement in my contract, so to avoid getting whipped I’m not going to go into any details here. What you need to know that it’s a very complicated computer system handling huge amounts of data – and the data is not being backed up externally.
Say what!? Continue reading "Lessons Learned the Hard Way." →
First Week.
Posted 21:57 CET Monday August 24th, 2009 (1 year, 10 days ago). 241 views. No comments. Tagged with Personal, Work.
I’ve had my first week in my new job at the NRK. It’s been interesting, but challenging – the platform I’m working on is huge and complicated. Even though the code might not be too intricate, I’ll probably use a lot of time figuring out how all the bits and pieces are connected.
I’m part of a team of five developers, with a raging 40 percent of the team members being female. Yet another developer will join November 1st, it’s a “he”, so the female percentage will drop, but it’s still quite high for a Java developer team. The size of the system and the huge brains of my fellow Java developers – not just the ones on my team, but all of the NRK Java developers – was a little bit intimidating at first, but I’ll get past that. I’ve already moved a yellow note on the Scrum board! Yay!
I’ve also begun working out again after taking about a month off during my summer vacation. I thought I deserved it and I also had to get my left shoulder a little rest. Now I’m back at the gym, my shoulder is behaving like it should and I’m working out at the NRK gym. It’s not very well equipped, but I can use it for free and it has the equipment I need to do most of my exercises. If everything feels OK on Friday, I’ll cancel my subscription at the other gym. Since only NRK employees can use the gym, it’s almost like a private one.
I feel important. It really doesn’t take that much to boost my ego.
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