Archive for April, 2006

Farewell, My Lovely (*)

April 27, 2006

My not so private tech life has been rather quite during the last weeks. That’s mainly due to the fact that I’m in the midst of changing my employer, i.e., I’m on holidays with the old one and haven’t yet started work for the new one.

Leaving a company and its people behind after seven successful years is quite an emotional experience for me and it made me wonder why I had decided to join andrena objects in 1999. Thinking this over revealed my tiny little “pattern” of how to decide on the right employer: I had chosen the previous jobs because I wanted to find a place where I’d be taught how to do things right. Although I got to know really smart people from whom I learned tons of useful stuff, all in all, no one succeeded in showing me how to do software development - as a profession - right.

With andrena I had changed my tactics: andrena seemed to be a place where I could try out ideas of my own and see if they would work. This was definitely a much better approach which eventually provided me with at least some basic insights into how software development - as a profession - can be done right. Thank you, andrena!

Hopefully, this approach will pay off with 100world as well.

(*) book title by Raymond Chandler, definitely one of my favourite American writers.

Rats

April 10, 2006

You might think it’s over, but it isn’t

All garbage has been collected. The remaining trash has been swiped away. But the rats, after having being crammed like kings for two months, miss their additional rations. They somehow manage to enter garbage bins…

What trapped rats can do
…and to get out again through 7mm of massive plastic!

I concede that any analogy can be stretched too far; nevertheless I wonder what’s the counterpart of rats in software systems which have seemingly been cleaned up and be ridden of all garbage? Maybe it’s us - the consultants - who won’t just leave voluntarily when we’ve fulfilled our task. Not until we are served a poisonous diet.