Blogging Pubbitch

I think it's fair to say that the iPhone is the best phone I've ever owned, but with the release of the new 2.2 software update, it just got a whole lot better.

I'm away from home right now, and will be for some time, and that means that I've had to make choices about which bits of techy paraphernalia I can bring with me. Unless I'm willing to do myself an injury, I can only really take one laptop on the road with me, and given that I'm here for work, it's the work laptop that came with me. Not, and this is important, my personal laptop.

It's important because I also brought my iPhone with me. Before I left, I synced up as many podcasts as I could, but some of these, especially the news podcasts, go stale pretty quickly. Without being able to connect to my personal laptop, there wasn't a mechanism to download new podcasts, rendering the latter parts of any trip devoid of fresh news.

Aside: I almost said "fresh content", but felt a little of sick at the back of my mouth, and so have skillfully avoided management-speak once again. Hurrah! Now back to the main thrust of this post. Mentally delete this paragraph and append the next one to the end of the last one, please.

No more! With the 2.2 release, I can download new podcasts, either of the set that are already synced with my iPhone or by using the built-in iTunes app on the phone to pick and download new ones. Sure, it would be nicer if this happened automatically, preferably using the same preferences I have on the desktop version of iTunes, but just having the option of downloading something new is a real boon.

Of course, to get this feature, I need to be able to install the 2.2 software update on my iPhone, and this is where Apple have once again done the Right Thing. Although I can't sync the iPhone with anything other than my personal laptop, I can do a software update on any machine running iTunes. It's not the sort of feature that you need on a regular basis, but when you find out it's there, life becomes a little more easy. Finding out that this capability is present brings me to another feature of the iPhone that I like: the ubiquity of the power lead, and the fact it plugs into the USB socket. It's a little roundabout, so please bear with me.

Back in the day, it was virtually impossible to run out of charge on a Nokia phone. Everyone had one, and because of this, everyone had ready access to the charger. Better still, all the phones used the same size connector. Wonderful. And then Nokia changed the size of the connector, and people started buying other makes of phone. Suddenly, it became a lot easier to run out of charge, and I started to have to bring my Nokia charger with me, along with the adapter so I could use it abroad. And a second adapter for my laptop. Or, as I did on a regular basis, you can juggle the foreign plug adaptor, switching to using it to charge the item with the least power as necessary.

Frankly, having a Nokia phone had become a major PITA.

The ideal for me is to be able to take one power adapter and to be able to charge everything from that. Ideally at the same time. The iPhone, the model of convergence in action, allows me to carry one device instead of two to meet my music-listening, phone-calling desires. It uses the same cable to charge and connect to the Mac as the iPod always has, and given the ubiquity of the iPod, that means that this particular lead is easy to get hold of. Because it plugs into the USB socket of my laptop (or, indeed, any machine) it's possible to charge that and the lappie from the same adapter. As a quirk, when you plug an iPod into a machine, iTunes often starts up, and will tell you about any new updates that might be present for the shiny piece of Appleness you've just plugged into the Intel designed port.

I'm sure that there are other goodies to do with the iPhone that make it indispensable --- the mail client, with its ability to access emails even when offline, has saved me a whole host of grief, and my wife and I now no longer bother to know where we're going actually is until well after we leave the house thanks to the combination of GPS, Google Maps and access to JourneyPlanner --- but the universality of access to the ability to charge the device, coupled with the ability to get new podcasts, means that the iPhone meets all my traveling needs for now.

It would be nice to be able to tether my laptop to its 3G connection sometimes....

Well, that went by fast!

It seems like only yesterday that I arrived for my first day at Google, but it's been a year. Looking back, I've managed to achieve a lot and blog very little. It's not always been perfect, but it's been great fun to work with the teams and people that I have. Being able to spend my 20% time on WebDriver has been a fantastic opportunity, too.

For people who like that sort of thing, here are some stats:

• Number of days as a Googler: 366 (2008 was a leap year)
• Number of projects worked on: 4
• Number of countries visited for work: 3 (US, Switzerland, Australia)
• Cities visited in the US: Mountain View, San Francisco, New York, Atlanta

I'm looking forward to the next year.

BTW, if you're passionate about testing, love writing software and are bored of your job, we're hiring....

I've been traveling a lot recently, which may explain why my inbox is now filled to bursting with emails to reply to. My apologies if you've sent me something and I've not responded. Hopefully normal service will be resumed soon :)

Well, it's been a week since I joined Google, and so far I'm enjoying it immensely. Let's see what the next week brings :)

• Your inbox is empty, and you've replied to every email that you should have
• During the build you're learning a new language. After a month, you're pretty proficient
• You've read all the news sites and blogs, and are reduced to scavenging for something new on the Net
• You have time to write blog entries about the signs that your build is too long

Sorry. This one's an epic post. What prompted it? Take a look at the last two paragraphs.

I've been in ThoughtWorks for well over a year now, and it looks as if I'm going to be here longer than anywhere else previously. This isn't hard because for a while, my jobs started having a half-life. The first one was a year, the second lasted six months and my third only 3 months before the company folded. In any case, rather than just going "yeah, I like it here" (and I do) it might be more fun to do this slightly differently. I present to you the Ugly, the Bad and the Good about working at ThoughtWorks.

Let's start with the ugly.

Let's face it, right now it's possible to make a stack of cash as an independent IT consultant. In fact, you can make so much money that there's no real way for a company the size of ThoughtWorks to compete. Of course, you trade earning power for security as part of a company, and from where I'm standing I think that ThoughtWorks manages to strike a reasonable balance between the two, but there's no getting away from it: you can earn more elsewhere.

What about travel? ThoughtWorks has offices scattered throughout the world and has a transfer programme in place, allowing people to move from office to office. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is the fact that as a consultant the work isn't always where the home is. When you sign up, that's one of the things that is made clear to you, and sometimes the luck runs out. Right now, I'm bang out of luck. Before that? Not doing badly at all, thank you very much partly because my commute to work involved taking a ferry past the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge.

The other big ugly involves the work. Sometimes there's no getting away from the fact that the work that's available just isn't the most interesting there is. On the plus side, since I'm working as a consultant and being rotated periodically on to new projects there's always the chance that the next leap will be the leap home. Or to a more interesting project. You get the idea.

On to the bad. Or as I like to think of it "the bit that could end up being a career limiting move". Oh well.

ThoughtWorks hires some really bright people. When I was looking for a job, it was the people that were the biggest attraction about the company. After all, the chance to work with some of the best minds in the industry is not something to be sniffed at. Sadly, these are people who are in demand, and sometimes they wander (or are drawn) off to pastures new. Every time one of the people who I look up to leaves the company it makes me stop and think about what I'm doing here.

Currently, EU law allows companies to ask employees to opt-out of the 48 hour working week. One of the key tenants of XP is the concept of "sustainable pace". Originally this was referred to as the "40 hour week". It seems to me that if a company really believes in sustainable pace, even if it's the norm for the country (and in my experience that includes the UK) asking their employees to sign out of the legislation that's meant to protect them from burn-out is an unusual thing to do. Now, I understand that there will be times where I'm just going to have to buckle down and get some work done and I've got no problem voluntarily working more than 40 hours a week, but deliberately trying to skirt around this issue makes me uncomfortable (hey! If anyone from legal wants to explain this a little better to me, then please go ahead and I'll blog about it here)

Enough whining! On to the part of the post that I'm looking forward to; the good parts of being a ThoughtWorker.

As I mentioned before, having the chance to work with other ThoughtWorkers is a huge draw to joining and staying with the company. Some of the established luminaries are obviously interesting to work with, but even the so-called junior people are a pleasure to work with. Catch me in the pub after a few beers, and I'll wax lyrical about how great my current dev team is. All of them. I even like the non-devs for many of the same reasons that make the devs fun to work with: they're smart, vocal, listen when they need to and have an energy that I sometimes notice is missing elsewhere.

If you get a chance, work with a ThoughtWorker. They're great. It should be a slogan somewhere.

The company really is a reflection of its people, and its people seem to want to do the Right Thing, both by each other and by our clients. Whenever I express discontent in some way or other someone somewhere makes the time to listen to me and to try and make things better. There's a whole company of people like that, striving to make it a better place to work. What's not to like about that?

Let me give you an example. On my current project there's a lot of travel and a lot of time away from home. ThoughtWorks realises how little the team like this and have pulled out all the stops. They've fought for (and managed to arrange) a four day working week (long days, though, don't think we got off lightly!) While we're away, they've arranged flats for all of us rather than hotel rooms. The flats are pretty good, and are being equipped with everything a geek needs (aka: broadband)

Indeed, the travel opportunities are something else that's good about ThoughtWorks. We've got offices spread around the globe, in America, the UK, China, India and Australia. I joined the Sydney office originally because we were living out there at the time and thinking about making the move for far longer. In the end, we had to come home, and we decided to do it the long way by taking three months to travel to all the places we'd not seen on our way down. ThoughtWorks agreed to a sabbatical and then a transfer to the UK office.

If we wanted to go travelling again, then it's a simple matter to apply for a transfer to another office. When there's the space on a project somewhere cool and they need me, then ThoughtWorks would make sure that I had a chance to go. The nice thing is, it doesn't matter how long you've been with the company or how senior you think you are, they'll try and make it happen.

I remember a time when a bunch of us were in a pub in Sydney. There was talk of a Ruby project in one of the other offices, and someone had Roy's number on their phone. So, we called the CEO of the company and signed up. What's not to like about a company where the management are so accessible? And so understanding of a bunch of slightly tipsy devs calling them up?

An accessible leadership is only any good if you know what's going on. Fortunately, within ThoughtWorks there's about as high a level of visibility as it's possible to get. You want to know something? Ask. It may already have been posted to one of the internal notice-boards.

What prompted me to write this post? Well, part of it has been the fact that I've not written much about ThoughtWorks and part of it was that I was asked to blog about the fact that we're hiring. Here's the sales pitch: as a geek, I love it here. There are some of the best people that I've ever worked with, all in one place. There are some cool, cutting edge projects too. Stuff for you to sink your teeth into. It's not the perfect place to work, but then nowhere is. We're working hard to make it as close to perfect as possible though, and we'll always need another voice to get us there.

If you think that you'd like to join us, then please sign up either directly or through me. Mention my name in either case. I get a bonus for it, you see....

Note to self: four days a week without email means that there will be lots of email that needs replying to.

Note to others: four days a week without email means that I'll reply to your email just as soon as I get a chance.

Now, where did I leave the delete key? :)

Sometimes, someone comes along and says "I'd like to do this", and you see that it's a Good Idea, and you say so. And then the other person says "I'd like to do it this way", and even though it's not the way that it would be done in the Ideal World, they explain the practical reasons why and you nod and agree. And then someone points out that even though this isn't the Ideal World, we could still try the Ideal World way, and if it works we're a step closer to where we want to be, and if it doesn't we're still no further away.

It would appear that I have a pathological inability to get out of the office on time and that my laptop is conspiring to make the whole situation infinitely less tolerable. *grr*

There's nothing like a good Tube strike to bring Londeners together. I mean, this morning, I was crammed into someone's spine and someone else's sweaty armpit when the nice gentleman on the platform behind me decided that what was really needed was a chance to get to know my fellow citizens better. This he achieved by ratcheting himself into the carriage muttering obviously false platitudes such as "loads of room in here", "this won't be a problem" and "don't try and push me off" (the last as he realised that the human body isn't hugely compressible and that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction)

Things were not helped by the fact that we're in the middle of a "cold snap", where the average temperature hovers around "pretty damn chilly" This means that any heater available is switched on, and everybody starts wearing more layers. Which would be alright if there were room to take off a few layers in a Tube carriage so packed that the EU wouldn't like sheep being transported that way.

Oh well. Mustn't grumble. At least it's not raining.