Categories
BT

Rating a company by its coffee provision

Marc McNeill makes some interesting observations on how you can judge a company by the coffee facilities it provides its employees. He lists, in order of decreasing clue:

  1. Vending machine that serves [quality] coffee on free vend.
  2. Kettle and filter coffee / Cafetiere to make my own.
  3. Kettle. I buy my own instant coffee.
  4. Vending machine that serves [quality] coffee that I have to pay for.
  5. Vending machine that serves [tasteless] cofee that I insert coins into.
  6. Vending machine that serves [tasteless] coffee that I insert a vending card into.

Where I work, we have a choice of options three or six. We also have another, that slots in one side or the other of number four:

  • Coffee bar that serves [quality[ish]] coffee that I have to pay [through the nose] for.

At the training centre where I’ll be on Wednesday (formerly a BT site, now run by Accenture), they’ve managed to find another option, which I guess ranks (and having tasted the coffee, I choose the word rank advisedly) at around 4.5:

  • Vending machine that serves [tasteless] coffee on free vend.
Categories
Agile BT

I guess we’re now a cool international telco

Overheard last night at XtC:

“I work for Dresdner.”

“Ah, they used to be a cool international investment bank.”

“What are we now then?”

“An international investment bank.”

“Why aren’t we cool any more?”

“Because you lost JP.”

Categories
General nonsense Software

I guess I really ought to learn Lisp

I was having a discussion last night about the value of learning new programming languages. I said I still felt I ought to learn Lisp, even if I was never likely to use it in anger, because it would hopefully give me a new way of thinking about problems which would be transferrable to other languages (especially ones like Ruby). Alkesh (come on, get a blog so I can link to it!) felt that Lisp was a dead language, and would be no more useful than learning Fortran or COBOL.

Then this morning I tried the Which Programming Lanuguage Are You? (via Steve Freeman).

You are Lisp. Very few people like you (Probably because you use too many parenthesis (You better stop it (Reallly)))

Fate?

Categories
Agile Software

The other kind of SOA

Most large organisations have been using SOA for years, and they’ve been doing it despite their IT strategy, not because of it. No, not Service-Oriented Architecture, but Spreadsheet-Oriented Architecture.

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Categories
Agile

We don’t have a Lord – team leadership and decision-making

Simon Baker has posted a response to John Scumniotales’s post on Team Leadership and Self Organization, and I have to say I’m with Simon.

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Categories
Agile Java

“Given when then” in JUnit

AS I mentioned at the end of this post, I’ve been convinced by Dan North’s case for using the “given when then” pattern for specifying scenarios during behaviour- or test-driven development, and while I wait for JBehave to be released, I’ve been playing around trying to come up with a way of using the pattern to clarify intent in (Java) unit/acceptance tests.

Continue reading ““Given when then” in JUnit”
Categories
Agile

Great waterfall quote

A slightly cynical post from Kevin Barnes today – bizarrely entitled Agile processes, are they killing our children? – contains the following line:

Managers like the waterfall model for the same reasons that tourists like real waterfalls, they are simple and powerful and beautiful to look at. They are much less fun when you go down one.

I didn’t think he’d be able to top that, until I read down a little and laughed out loud:

The one group that always had mixed feelings about the waterfall model was consultants. Consultants can’t afford to show up, work for months at a time and produce no real results (unless they’re Accenture).

Categories
BT Software

Bookmarklet to convert intranet URIs for connection via VPN

It’s quite common these days for organisations to allow external access to their intranets using an SSL VPN, but it can be a bit of a pain if you’re trying to follow a ‘normal’ intranet hyperlink (eg from an e-mail) – you have to paste the URL into a box on the VPN homepage and have it converted.

To make it easier I’ve created a bookmarklet to do the conversion. It may not work for all sites, as I’m only constructing the new URI based on a simple inspection of a couple of pages.

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Categories
Agile

No satisfaction – the Toyota process

There’s an excellent article about the Toyota process on fastcompany.com. Most of the behaviours described are also desirable or necessary in teams or organisations trying to be[come] agile, but the key point is in the conclusion:

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Categories
Agile BT

The death of the Big Blue Notebook

No lab books!
Ever since I started work, people have had big blue (or more recently black and red) books that they wrote stuff in. I’ve always called them lab books, but that seems to cause amusement to some people, presumably because I don’t work in a lab.

Some of the things that were written were notes from meetings, to do lists, or rough design notes. The most important ones though, the ones that you kept referring back to (if you could find them), were the little snippets of secret knowledge that everyone accumulates as they learn the intricacies of their particular job, whether it’s useful unix commands or instructions for using a particular build system.

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