The Musings of the Kat

Posted by Kat Crichton Sun, 20 Aug 2006 18:47:00 GMT

It's hard work breaking in new recruits. I've had a sore throat all week from trying to justify our existing code-base and customer relationships.

As hoped, the new blood is having an almost immediate positive effect. Irritations that had faded into background noise have been brought to the fore.

Someone without the tarnish of several years on the frontline can much easier see the atrocities that are committed in the name of Truth, Justice and the Extreme Way. Not that any blame should be attributed to XP - just to our slow deviation from the path of the righteous.

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 06 Jun 2006 11:47:00 GMT

Our XP team is distinctly low on developers at the moment. We're down to five from twelve earlier in the year. The backlog of stories is constantly growing as the team just doesn't have the bandwidth. The extra pressure may be partly responsible for pushing good people out of the company.

It seems that any team looses motivation without a transfusion of new blood, even though years of team experience should create a much more capable entity.

The remaining developers have all been with the company for 5+ years which creates a more cynical atmosphere than usual. New blood brings with it enthusiasm untainted by previous business mistakes, which blends well with experience gained by learning from those mistakes.

The small team size also means that we don't have variety of skills and enthusiasm. Specific jobs cannot be handled by people with a preference for that type of work, so boredom sets in.

The good news is that we're recruiting heavily now and will hopefully soon have some of the necessary claret. It's up to us to make the team successful again.

Posted by Kat Crichton Fri, 10 Mar 2006 08:49:00 GMT

Our old boss is leaving the company in disgrace. Normally disgrace involves immediate absence, however we like to drag out the agony as long as contractually possible. The same seems to be happening with one of our sales team who, post-resignation is still "selling" the company's wares. Oh well, ours not to reason why!

On the positive side, we have a new chap taking over with a wider remit. At the moment he is meeting with each member of the team to get an overview of the current state of affairs.

The meetings have varied in length from an hour or so to a day and a half. This would seem to indicate some variation in either the amount of issues each person has with the company or the faith each person has that their comments will not be used in evidence against them.

From my experience, I'm inclined to believe that no one starts a new job intending anything other than to make improvements. Of course, what is an improvement from the perspective of the company is not always an improvement for the employee.

Here's to interesting times! I'm positive about the future, but not self deluding enough to believe it will be easy.

Posted by Kat Crichton Mon, 09 Jan 2006 15:01:00 GMT

Managed the upgrade to version 1 without any major hitches. Just two notable differences...

• The AJAX stuff is fixed (which stopped us from upgrading to the last release).
• ActiveRecord has slightly stricter constraints on creation of new objects with has_and_belongs_to_many relationships.

The ActiveRecord change means that you can't create a new object and it's join table based relationships without first saving the main object. If object has_and_belongs_to_many relations, then...

object = Object.new
object.relations << relation
object.save

object = Object.create 
object.relations << relation

It makes some sense, since the identity of object has not yet been created, but it's a bit of a shame that the ORM layer can't hide these issues from you.

Posted by Kat Crichton Wed, 30 Nov 2005 06:28:00 GMT

Just got back from XPday5 where my colleague Dafydd Rees and I presented a talk on Rails for Real. It seems to have gone down well and a lot of delegates were interested in learning more about our experiences using Ruby-on-Rails for a major project.

I very nearly didn't make it up to London at all having contracted a nasty stomach bug or flu at the weekend, which returned shortly after the talk. Thankfully adrenalin kicked in for the duration.