New year, new job

January 8th, 2010 by Brian | Filed under work.

A few weeks ago, after 10 fun years at IBM I left and took a new job with Skarven Enterprises, a Boeing Company. I call my years at IBM “fun”, because they were – I really did enjoy my time there. Tons of great projects, always playing with new technologies, building applications that targeted all 300,000 IBMers, and most of all, making so many good friends along the way.

At IBM I did a lot of development, in what I now realize was in a non-traditional environment, for better or worse at times. Skaven is hardcore into Agile. It’s actually a fairly thin layer on top of what I was most doing at IBM (other people are worrying more about the semantics of Agile right now), but it adds enough structure & reporting to make me feel like management is aware of what’s going on. It’s kinda cool to be learning about Agile at the same time as a Sprint is already in progress – it’s a great way to pick up on things quickly.

In my new position I’m going to be doing Ruby on Rails development, which means I have to actually learn it! I’m currently going through lotsa of learning: the system, the development environment, Agile, scrum… and the roads to get there! I’m really psyched, and I can’t wait to contribute some real work. That should be coming in the next few weeks after I “pass the Qualifications Board”.

I’m going to start trying to blog more as I figure out exactly what I’m doing  :)

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4 Responses to “New year, new job”

  1. Wolf | 8/01/10

    Hey Brian. Good to hear you’re making a new nest. In my experience, the concepts of agile are great but some of the semantics and rigid aspects (burndown, etc) not so much. Here’s a little post on planning poker – http://wolfc.posterous.com/planning-poker-basics – it’s good exercise in some ways but not as efficient as HML sizing estimates in the early stages. Good luck man.

  2. Brian | 10/01/10

    Thanks Wolf. I am not up on all the sizing estimate strategies, in fact I have to go look up HML after this. I just participated in my first planning poker meeting on Friday. It was interesting, especially considering I don’t know the details of the system. It was agreed that it was OK because my input would be tempered by others playing. It was pretty cool. I came in with mostly higher estimates, and even a few times was able to convince the others to talk about it more and they agreed to increase their estimates.

    Anyway, we’ll see how it turns out. Since it was initial sizings, they are expected to be off, but it was useful to get some kind of base level.

  3. Robi | 11/01/10

    Glad you’re finding roots. Will be interesting to see how the internal apps and infrastructures differ from the behemoth that IBM is. Sometime it’s good to see a different view and get a bit of a reset to get things moving along faster and better :)

  4. SeanC | 13/01/10

    Good luck with the now job!

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