Day 5 at Integrum (or, “Where I Have Been”)

Hello everyone that is still hanging on despite my neglect to this blog. I have a new job. Conditions have coalesed in such a way that I am now not working at Big Brothers Big Sisters and am instead working at Integrum, in Chandler Arizona. There are a lot of things I am getting used to here.

Integrum has tightly knitted itself with Agile Programming Methodologies, which means, from my perspective, that they have turned the heat up - the environment is very dynamic and productive. I actually wrote quite a bit of code in the last 4 days - more than a month at Big Brothers Big Sisters. We work in pairs: two programmers, one laptop. So things aren’t really done in isolation - the Gollum-like programmer who doesn’t talk to human being’s and melds completely with his computer in a borgesque mutation of machine and man, is not really compatible with the agile methods - it is too social a thing for much dampness. Working with these guys is very different than my traditional setup - working alone in an office. Very challenging. Very good.

The people here are friendly. However, everyone gets ribbed and teased. Which points out to me that I can be rather sensitive - defensive, at times. But its cool because we all work in a room together - everyone is teasing everyone -no one is singled out. I’ve been in situations where things get cliquish and I have ended up on the outside of that circle - sometimes, when things got really mean, they would put glass in my pudding! I rather suspect that I was being over-sensitive, though. Because truthfully the programmers never put anything in my pudding - I didn’t even ever eat pudding, so there never was much danger. I guess on a personality level, “not taking anything personally” seems to be in order. And learning to dish it. I have to stock up on ‘your mom’ jokes. Please leave me some comments on that.

Probably the most difficult adjustment for me will be arriving on time at work every morning at 8:45. This will be the first job I have that has had that kind of schedule. Well, actually, I’ve had lots of jobs that have that schedule, I think it is more that I have not adhered to said schedule. Here at Integrum there is a stand-up meeting every morning at 8:45. That is actually really helpful - it means i have to be in at that time - to contribute and to receive direction.

I have to adjust to new tools. I have always worked on Windows, but at this job everyone works on Macintosh laptops. So now I am slowed down a bit just moving around and finding the things I need. However, after just a few days I am really enjoying playing with Macintosh - its definitely a fun toy - especially after being somewhat cloistered under the warm-embracing hug of Microsoft for too long. What I notice is that the experience seems to be ‘closer to the user’. It’s hard to explain, but the way everything is presented and organized just feels very flowing. I guess I miss the backspace button. On MacBook you have a delete button so you have to eradicate things from the right-side, as opposed to the left-side on windows.

Then there is the obvious - I am getting used to Ruby on Rails - I have enjoyed playing with it up till now - and have been more productive - but at this job everything is running at a full factor of efficiency above what I have achieved in my 11 years of being in the software writing industry. I have a lot to learn about this type of development and the opportunity to learn is omnipresent here - it’s really fun, and it is very challenging. I am surrounded by some really high class developers in an agile environment, and it is just what I needed.