Elegant Chaos

I’ve had an interesting time over the last year at Sony, but recently I started to realise that it wasn’t really going in the direction that I wanted, and so I started to look around for alternatives.

As it turned out, my old friends at Sports Interactive were on the look out for a programmer. Things have moved on a lot at SI in the last couple of years, and to cut a long story short, I decided that I was very interested in going back there - and so, that’s what I’m going to do.

The decision was made a while ago, but I’ve been keeping quiet about it until I actually left Sony, which happened this Tuesday. So on Monday, I’ll be starting back at SI towers.

They say that you should never go back… but then they say all sorts of stupid stuff, so what do they know…

;)

technorati tags:jobs, sportsinteractive

Recently, I’ve been trying to convince my colleagues to make more use of wikis and forums, rather than writing word documents and having face to face convesions about them.

This, perhaps not surprisingly, has met with a range of reactions from amusement to confusion to derision!

Why the hell, people want to know, are you engaged in a heated debate (read flame war) on the forums, with the bloke who sits next to you?

Lest you get the wrong idea, let me say quite categorically that I’m all for face to face interaction - in fact I reckon we could do with a bit more of it on my current project.

The problem with face to face, though (at least until technology catches up with us) is that there is no permanent record of what was said. Making a decision is all very well in the here and now, but what happens in six months time when we are sitting round scratching our heads and asking ‘how the hell did we get here?’. What happens when I get run over by a bus and some other poor sod has to pick up where I left off?

Yes I can look at the design document (we do have such things!), but most of the time it represents the start of the discussion, not the end. The design usually sparks a conversation, or a gradual process of discovery, and that’s what I want to capture.

It’s interesting working for a relatively big company - my new gang are a lot more organised than SI, and I’d say that on the whole the development team are more experienced and more open minded, which has a good effect on the overall quality of the coding.

I’ve got a way to go though before I reach nerdvana. This place, on the other hand, sounds a lot closer to the way I’d like to be doing things in an ideal world.

I’ve made a personal commitment to doing as much unit testing as I can on my code, regardless of what anyone else does. It’s pretty tricky to do pair programming though, which is what I’d really like, unless we all commit to it. I haven’t actually asked, but I think I can guess what the answer would be…