I had again the not-so infrequent pleasure of setting up fresh copy of Windows development stack. We were moving few machines between projects and to make sure that no forgotten source files are left on the harddisk, we reformatted and reinstalled Windows from scratch. It is usually good idea anyway, because developers like to install strange tools and utilities and generally customize machines to their own taste, which tend to be unique and is seldom shared.
(a followup to discussion last week)
In every outsourced software project you have four large areas: your customer, the business vertical you are writing software for, your implementation team and the technology foundation or platform you are using.
Two of these areas are on "internal" side of your organization (team and technology), two of them are on external - your customer side (business domain and customer organization). Two are more micro level in the sense that they have strong human interaction aspect (customer and team) and two are more macrolevel and less personal (business domain and technology). For that reason, you can represent these areas as quadrants using two axis micro/macro and internal/external: micro+internal = team, micro+external = customer, macro+internal = platform, macro+external = business domain.The degree of risk in the project is proportional to how many of these quadrants are actually unknown or new. Why is that ?
Connie, our HR director came few weeks ago with interesting idea: give the team a chance to get better understanding of "implementation details" of their very own "inner software" - the personality type evaluation using Myers-Briggs approach. Connie holds certification for this type of classification.
The classification in a nutshell, assigns to everybody four letters, one from each pair: E or I, N or S, T or F, J or P. The first letter indicates preference for Extraversion or Introversion, the second characterizes the main source of information input: Sensation or iNtuition, the third the way how the information is processed - by Thinking or Feeling and the last one characterizes the degree of "structure" and organization in all the previous: more organized and structured (Judging) or less organized and more ad-hoc (Perceiving). Now all this is terrible oversimplification (sorry Connie), so if you really want to get more information try this - or if you are in Ottawa, call Connie Deschamps at Thinknostic dot com and schedule a session :-).
The 2006 was truly amazing year. We have accomplished so much - we have created the West end development centre, brought in and started several projects, completed phase 1 of employee conversion, started benefits program, ESOP program, redefined the company visual presence, grew the business and the company size considerably and created foundation for future growth.
Most important achievemnt is the fun factor - I am again looking forward to go to work - and again since the Montage days the synergy is coming back. Thanks so much to all of you who helped it happen.
It is this time of year - Christmas parties. It looks like the number of parties we go to every year increases - did not figure out yet which function it is, let's hope it is not exponential. This year, the number was four. First was traditional Christmas party at Peter's place. Second one - which I unfortunately missed - was a gettogether of Montage/Allstream alumni. I was sick and in bed - sorry I missed this one. Hope that there will be more opportunities for meeting during the long winter that is still ahead of us. Third party - "the party" - is Thinknostic Christmas Party, this year happening at Steve's place. And the party marathon will be closed by tomorrow's Tirestamp party at Sean's.
Since the beginning of the biometric security project, we are using an excellent enterprise-level Wiki Confluence as knowledge repository and main team communication tool. I was not sure at the beginning, how will the Wiki approach work for all the people on the team, mostly because once before I already tried it and had not much success of introducing the idea. It was few years ago and the Wiki engine I used were nowhere in the same league as Confluence, but main problem at that time was probably the users' mindset. I am happy to report that this time it worked really really well. I am not sure whether it was because of the fantastic user friendly features and capabilities of Confluence, or because the general awareness shifted thanks to sites like Wikipedia and people got used to the idea of user created content ... The truth is that Wiki's are mainstream now - inside or outside of the enterprise space.
I have been pretty quiet in last few days. The reason why was hinted here - we have finally a space. The project started on Monday and we were running around like crazy since Sunday. Started with moving in looots of boxes - 9 workstations, each with two 19" LCD monitors plus three servers, network gears, cables etc - three full cars. Then came the unpacking and setting up, which took much longer time that I would ever have expected. But it went well - modulo few glitches - like missing DVI cables and only one disk in server that should have been RAID-ed ...