I’ve got a lot of great excuses to why I’ve been so lazy, however. Or at least one: Work. I spent the first week of 2011 in Helsinki, Finland. At first it was freezing cold, the it got a bit warmer and rather wet.

In Finland me and forty of my esteemed colleagues learned how to behave like proper Senior Consultants. We’re role models now, apparently. Our version of the typical Senior Consultant is not exactly like the Wikipedia version. The sales bit is toned down a little and that suits me very well – I probably couldn’t sell bottled water in Sahara.

Among the things we did was to play with LEGO for two days, an activity that magically turned some of us into ScrumMasters. Then we learned the ins and outs of how the company’s sales department operate, and even though I’m not sales material, it was, hands down, the week’s best session. Towards the end of the week we went through a tech case focusing on test and legacy code refactoring, topics that are very interesting for any consultant touching code, senior or not.

And did I mention the lightning talks and the two evenings with Open Spaces? Well, I did now. And there you have it: Quite a few reasons why being a BEKK employee is a good thing.

Do you hear that, Terje?

¹⁾ I made up this word.

I’m writing this because I desperately needed a break from the test exams and I’ve got a feeling turning on the TV will only make me even dumber than I already feel. Yes, I managed to pass the first Whizlabs preparation exam I took, but some of the questions I got wrong even people who think Java is all about coffee probably would have been able to guess correctly.

Of course we could get into a discussion about to what degree getting the certification is important to prove you know the ins and outs of the language and how relevant the exam questions are compared to the everyday struggles of your average Java programmer, but let’s leave that one for now. I feel a rant coming, but I probably shouldn’t write it before I’m actually certified.

Now I need some food and the willpower to sit down for another three consecutive hours of DOES NOT COMPUTE.

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.

I don’t really know enough about the emission trading scheme to say anything about it. And as many other Norwegians I’m skeptical to things I don’t know much about. What does it mean, in real life, that I buy emission allowances and become carbon neutral? I don’t know. I checked what I had to pay to get carbon neutral on Climate and Pollution Agency pages, and it’s really not that expensive. But I feel I need to read more up on that before I eventually decide to part with my hard earned cash or not.

What I can do, however, is to go the vegetarian route. My two big sins when it comes to the environment now is that I eat a lot of meat and that I use too much hot water. To stop eating meat and use less hot water are things I can do today. The main problem is that I really like the taste of hot, juicy flesh in my mouth and I love a long, hot shower.

Still, it’s possible to take baby steps. I very, very much doubt that I will stop eating meat entirely and a man’s got to shower, doesn’t he? At least that’s what I’m told when I don’t do it. However, when I met Karine this afternoon at a café downtown, I took one small baby step towards cutting down on my meat eating habit: I had myself a vegetarian burger.

And boy do I feel cheated!

If I’m to eat less meat, I need to find some more intriguing vegetarian dishes than that burger. Two large mushrooms squeezed in between two pieces of bread ain’t a meal – everything on my plate was a side dish. The whole thing took only a minute to prepare, though…

Anyway – I hereby start my search for a proper vegetarian meal!

*Just for the record; I don’t own and plan to never own any of these t-shirts.

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!

Every day I’m up at 7 in the morning for a little bit of physical education. The options are many: Running, beach volleyball, football (a.k.a “soccer”) and swimming. In my case “swimming” would mean “near-death-experience”, so I opt for the safest option: Running. Since time is of the essence and we’re 6 people in each cabin who needs to take a shower after the workout, I’ve usually only jogged two or three laps on my own personal course. Each lap is a measly 1.5 kilometers, so it’s not that far, but it’s surprisingly refreshing. Although this might sound like something that could be defined as hard work, I feel quite upbeat for the rest of the day – even though I might not look that way, I rarely do – and I’ve managed to stay away from coffee since we arrived at Lyngørporten.

In between the more serious, educational stuff, something always happens – organized by our Energizer bunny coaches. Be it more physical education, a boat trip to on the of the many islands nearby, fishing, a BBQ, kayaking or something similar. Not much time to read a book, and the three I brought with me can only be considered dead weight by now.

So to sum everything up, and I dare to sum it up even if we’re two days from departure*: It’s been an interesting and educational ride, but getting back home will be good. Real good.

As a side note, I should probably mention that Lyngørporten is a very nice resort. Modern cabins, good food, great location. Everyone here speaks English in case you lack the necessary Norwegian skills to order beer and an nacho chips. The chef is British or Australian (I can’t decided) and we’ve stumbled across both British and American visitors. Oh, I almost forgot the most important of all: They’ve got Wi-Fi.

*In case things suddenly turn to the worse, I’ll let you know.

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.

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.

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!?

It’s interesting to see that even if a company looks very professional from the outside, you keep stumbling across things like this when you’re allowed to venture inside the corporate box. Of course, this is not unique to my employer, I’ve heard similar stories from other people and I’ve also experienced the same with other companies. I’m sure you have experienced the same yourself. But seriously, not making external backups of the data stored by the computer system in question – or any computer system for that matter – is complete and utter madness. Even if you make physical backups of all the data it doesn’t matter when both the original and the backup is located at the same room.

When the server room melts down – and it will – you’re fucked. As simple as that. Let me give you a very relevant and recent real life example:

The T-Mobile Sidekick is a mobile phone and communications device that uses a computer cloud to store the user’s personal data. A computer cloud in this setting is a collection of servers hosted by a Microsoft-owned subsidiary called Danger. Now, according to TechCrunch, the Sidekick users have been suffering from a major outage all week. In a statement released by T-Mobile yesterday, they report the following:

[...]

Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low.

[...]

Can I get a whoops-a-daisy?

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 1^st, 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.

That I’ll be biking at least 11.8 kilometers each day, five days a week, has made me decide to stop running on the thread mill. The weekly 59 kilometers should be more than enough stamina work out for me. I very much welcome this change, because running on a thread mill has turned out to be one of the most boring things I do, right up there with shaving.

While we’re on the subject on working out, here’s a quick update: My left shoulder is acting up a little, so I didn’t go to the gym today even though I planned to. I’m using my shoulder in virtually every exercise I’m doing, crunch being the only one where the shoulder is not involved.

I’m considering taking the entire week off to give the shoulder some rest. Kind of like a summer vacation from the gym. It probably wouldn’t hurt.

But I’m not here to talk to you about the heat, you all probably know what it feels like when it’s 30 degrees Celsius outside. I’m writing this to tell you all about an interesting change in my life: I’m heading back to the rat race for real.

For a few months now I’ve been working half time-ish for my previous employer. The hours and the money were both good, but we all knew it was only temporary. There was a reason why I quit in the first place, and to be honest that reason is just as valid today as it was half a year ago.

So on Monday August 17 I’m having my first day at the company where I started my computer science career back in 2003, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, or NRK as we like to call it in the land where polar bears are roaming the streets during winter.

I’ll be part of the team working on their web publishing platform. I can only imagine that it’s a behemoth of a system and I’m looking forward to diving down into documentation, APIs, diagrams and whatnot. The system I’ve been a part of developing for the last 5 years has also been quite large and complicated, but it’s different when you’ve been there since the first line of code was written. Now I’ll have to tackle a code base that I’m assuming is quite large already. I will also have to get used to frame works and development methods I’m familiar with, but don’t necessarily use too often.

There are a lot of things that makes NRK a very attractive place to work for me. One thing is that they managed to convince me that they have good methods for project planning, development, testing and deployment. All this are important to be able to have a work day that is at least semi-predictable and a job where you actually leave your tasks at work when you go home. Of course I realize that there will be times when things you didn’t predict happen, and I’ll need to work a little extra, but as long as it’s not every single day, I’m fine.

One of the most interesting things about this new job is that Hallvard will be my boss. Even though he will not tell me what to do on a day-to-day basis, he will the one who has to fire me if I fuck up. And if you try to browse nrk.no after August 17 and you see nothing, I’m probably the one to blame.