TW Anthology

I learned about the TW Anthology today and checked it out on Amazon. Looks like they're a little expensive.

Day 1 continued again

Someone is ringing a bell in the office. The kind that's on the desk of the IIT post office. It's making me oddly homesick. Or that might be the fact that I turned my screen brightness to max to try to make myself more alert. It's not really working, but I'm still plugging along. I really hope that I'll think better tomorrow when I'm better rested.

Things I'm trying to do:
- get Ruby and ruby version manager working on mac
- finish the analysts problem part 1
- finish the microtesting segment of Industrial Logic

Things which are making me fail:
- indian bathrooms
- the book cabinet is locked
- my music and the micrpotesting movies can't exit simultaneously
- Mac keyboard shortcuts
- IntelliJ vs eclipse
- eclipse autocomplete is different on mac
- shouldersurfing
- worrying about the stuff in my room that's locked up because the locks are crappy

I'm enormously happy that I have a power converter. I can charge everything now.

I'm a little worried that my team isn't meshing yet... but these things take time. Actually, I'm more worried that I specifically am not meshing. Partially because cubbing, tourism, and drinking are subjects of lesser interest to me than to others. I shoudl stop worrying. It's day one. We barely know each other. And we're all sleep deprived and in culture shock. It'll be fine.

The guys in reddish-purple polo shirts are... servants? Staff? They serve the food, come around and pick up the dishes, take out the trash, etc. It's a little awkward but not that bad.

There are two coat trees of motorcycle helmets in the front lobby. Apparently almost everyone has one of those.

Martin Fowler is sitting at the table to my right. I'm debating with myself whether it would be too terribly horribly geeky to ask him if we could take a picture together. I know several people who would be very envious. ...to be honest, that would involve getting up, which would involve motor control... and I'm too tired to have that.

Something about India makes me use many elipses. Possibly because of the uncertainty factor inherent in everything?

India Day 1 continued

Six of us are working in the main room at TW on some hw stuff. Fun times! Lol, non-programmers programming (Analyst training, etc)

The biggest difference between India and America so far are the bathrooms. I prefer American bathrooms. By a lot.

I'm the only one here with headphones in... also the only one working alone... eh, these things happen. i was teaching for a while but now rebecca is doing it. I'm shouldersurfing and learning along. :)

All of our trainers showed up around 10am or 10:30. We're sitting at a table with them... they're doing their own stuff. Tomorrow, we have to be downstairs at 730 and we'll go get breakfast and have orientation...

Day 1 in India

Last night we arrived at the airport a bit past midnight. Went through security and Customs (they were very fast and much milder than USA. Our driver (there were two vans for the eight of us. I rode shotgun! Exciting.) The driving was not that exciting because there was not much traffic.

Driving with my friend Sanborn in the USA was a good preparation for this driving. Late night little-traffic driving didn't scare me... probably rush hour traffic will, though.

We arrived at the office a little after 3am local time. There was a little confusion about room keys...

We arrived at the front door to C tower, but there was no one at the desk so we went up to the 2nd floor, where TW's main offices are. A guy at the desk gave us our keys after some confusion, and summoned a guide to help us find our rooms (which were not all in C building... I'm in H building, we have some guys in P, C, A...) there were some language difficulties. Eventually Uchenna(spelling?) and rebecca and I hared off on our own and found H (all the girls are in H I guess) after some exploration (the front area of the buildings have large signs on them with their letters, and they're in roughly alphabetical order, so it wasn't too hard)

Our rooms are very large- Uchenna and I are in a suite for 3. We each have our own private room. There is a kitchen and a laundry nook. The kitchen has some cookies in it...

All over, there are switches, and we don't know what they all do... we figured out the ones for the hot water heater in the shower... and some of them are for the fans, and some of them are for the lights... but really, that's all we know .

The taxi van on the way here had a little Ganesh on the dashboard and it made me think of Ursula. :)

In the apartment, the outlets are India-style so we didn't get to charge anything... in the office the outlets are dual-style, so that's good. :)

This morning I woke up around 8:30am local time (after taking a 2hr nap after getting to my hotel room). Took a caffeine pill... walked to the office (not hard to find but I did make one false start in the wrong direction...) hung out awkwardly for a while, since no one seems to know or care that I'm here... a nice guy from the London office told me where the breakfast was. It's some kind of short-string pasta, and coconut curry... and I have pseudo-Fanta to go with it and I am happy. On plate two right now. I hope it doesn't do anything awful to my digestion.

So now I guess we'll hang out for a while... eventually our trainers will show up and tell us what to do... until then, I'll work on the Industrial Logic courses, I think.

Currently 1PM in Chicago and 9:30am in India.

But then Shefali and Rebecca showed up! They went to go get breakfast. There is an option for custom-made omelettes, lol.

TW: Day 1 in Chicago

Yesterday was my first day of work at ThoughtWorks. This Friday will be my first time trying to figure out how to fill out my timesheet/ expense sheet.

First day: lots of listening to presentations. Lots of filling out and signing papers. Presentation from Legal on open source participation (do it. and for gods sakes tell us what you're doing), review of read before you sign (anything, but especially anything a client hands you- and call Legal before you sign it), got our building badges (but don't bring them to India and lose them!)

Sessions ran from 9am to ~5pm. Getting the RSA on our new laptops set up was the most error-prone part...

Yeah they gave us laptops. As a dev, I had a choice between a macbook pro, and some kind of Dell... I chose the macbook and I'm a little giddy. I've never had a mac because macs are bloody expensive. It's not actually mine... it's on lease... but I get to use it! And it is pretty. Analysts can't have the pro, they only get the regular... maybe because devs theoretically need faster computers. I'm not sure that the mild resentment is worth the cost savings...? Eh, it's not that bad.

One guy is using his mac air instead... usually not allowed to use your own but he got some kind of deal working with 8600 (8600 is tech support. Awesome name.)

New Hire Lunch was tasty. Pizza. I guess they order from that place a lot.

TW bug

if you go to http://blogs.thoughtworks.com/ then you see a list of blog posts. If you go to https://blogs.thoughtworks.com/ then you see a submission page for code tests.

This is awkward for me, because my Chrome tries to force https on everything (because I told it to). In order to see the "real" version of this page (or any link to this page) I have to either disable my add-on or open it in Firefox.

Random note: My tag for my TW-related thoughts is ThoughtWorks but my tag for my upcoming experience at ThoughtWorks University will be TWU. There will probably not be double-tagging on the TWU posts.

non-forbidden knowledge

So now I know how to recommend someone, or refer them, or whatever, to TW. Cool. useful knowledge.

Things I have heard of today for the first time:

The company factset (financial stuff)

nlp research at bing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

I wrote down a short summary of my hiring process at TW which I don't think will give anyone any clues on how to game the system, but which helps me keep straight in my head what happened. Here it is. (One line per item)

1. Contact w recruiter (for me, at IIT career fair and then again at GHC10)
2. Email test on ethos/writing skills
3. Email code test
4. In-office Wonderlic test, TW proprietary logic test
5. In-office pair programming w/ 2 TWers on prev code test, interview w/ HR re: travel fitness and decisionmaking skills in client situations, interview w/ head of Chicago office
6. Get a phone call. Get a packet of papers to sign. Sign papers, mail them back.
7. In-office Agile workshop (for me it was after signing, but for many others it was before)

ThoughtWorks Home Office Day

ThoughtWorks Home Office Day apparently hasn't happened in a while... like, a year or so (although Chi-Fridays happen every month?) Anyway, one of them happened today. I met Ronnigan, who's also a new hire starting in January. I introduced us as Newb One and Newb Two. I met a ridiculous number of people whose names I don't really remember, including the head of TW in the Americas, to whom I said "well, shit." I think that falls under the category of putting my foot in my mouth rather than speaking truth to power. He didn't seem to take it badly.

Joanne explained that TW has a very "flat" structure... which basically means that 1. I will someday get to meet Martin Fowler !!!!!!!! 2. It's normal to mingle socially at company events with people who are serious firepower.

I went to a session on Mingle, which is software that TW made to manage Agile projects with. It looks like it'll actually be useful. I like large parts of the UI. However, I am severely disappointed by how slowly that chart rendered. Seriously, it took over two minutes. Nothing should take over two minutes. Especially something that you need to do all the time...

I went to a session on noSQL, which as cool... mostly review for me, but shiny. MongoDB is a big thing at TW, it seems.

Went to a session on "the cloud" which was interesting. Lots of stuff about how it can apply to current and future TW projects, and things to watch out for... i.e. reserved vs. non-reserved instances.

I wonder what my life would be like if CleverSafe (a cloud services company) had hired me. I hope they fix the problems that the one marketing guy left behind. I still wonder how their algorithms work, dammit. (InStep Software called me to schedule an interview a couple days ago but I told them that I was currently employed. I am charmed that they called, though.)

I went to the lightning talks. I liked the one that was basically a State of the Union talk on what's up with Oracle and Java. It's all a little complicated... There was also a talk from the women's shelter people that the in-office hackathon was benefiting. And one from Julie and her Grace Hopper peeps, so that was cool.

There was a large session which focused on the three columns... breaking up into groups, etc. Post-its are awesome is the lesson here...

I went to the birds of a feather meetup and sat in the dev circle... it was pretty awesome. When Ron said "Flash" he got a kinda incredulous/eew reaction. When I said "crypto" I just got a hell of a lot of perfectly straight faces...

By the way, it turns out that the Borders that I pass on my way to TW has a bitching hacker section in their CS books. It's on the third floor... somehow, before tonight I was under the impression that there were only two floors. -shrug- Now I know. I intend to make some serious purchases someday soon... probably on Amazon, because those books are fucking expensive in-store.

As for further festivities at TW... there was beer pong, and a wine tasting... and excessive amounts of tasty beer, including Sierra and Blue Moon. So I can't fault their taste, although if there had been Guinness or cider I would've chosen that over anything.

After TW, I went to the IIT acappella concert. It was glorious. I think that it's the first time in perhaps several weeks that I've felt genuinely moved by something. They're having some trouble producing and delivering the CD that they took many pre-orders for, several months ago. I wish they would just distribute it on Bandcamp.

One of my friends bought a welding torch and he and some of the guys were practicing pulling good welding beads... on the kitchen floor... which is now scorched... sigh. Well, that can be covered up. I have to say, I'm excited to have access to a torch. (Yes, they also have a helmet facemask shield thing.) I plan to take pics of the welding in action.

Extreme Programming Applied by Auer and Miller

I got this book in the mail today. I don't think that it's the one that TW will want me to buy and read, but this is a fucking excellent book and I'll read their favorite when they tell me what it is, because they haven't done that yet (it's not like it'll take me until January to read it, so that doesn't bother me.)

Extreme Programming Applied by Auer and Miller http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Programming-Applied-Playing-Win/dp/0201616408

Frankly, I bought it because 1. Fowler linked to it and 2. It was $0.01 (+shipping) used.

It is- let me say this again- awesome. It has stories. Which is to say, short biographical case studies. I skimmed the table of contents and then started skipping around in the book. It is tasty. Writing style is important, dammit.

"Suppose the best programmer on your team gets run over by a truck." p.170

I mean, I totally always start with that assumption...

"If I could write code that you couldn't understand, then I was, by implication, smarter than you. You can imagine the stinky code that came out of this group!" p.213

Anyway, the book might not be as entertaining as I think it is right now, but meh. Will see.

Amp talk @ ThoughtWorks

These are straight notes taken during the presentation and posted during the clapping. They may be updated later to add explanation and details. Presentation: 6:30pm-7pm, + questions.

Talk is by Justin Love

AMP: Mercurial.

http://www.delicious.com/rauros/amp

His first version control was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_SourceSafe ...soon learned better. had to let Windows ppl in, so used Hg (git was no-windows in 2007)

Michael Edgar, Ari Brown. User seydar

Current version: Amp 0.5.3

Starting to implement git support. Which is hard. Started over and scrapped the old one. Learned a lot. This time: modular. Amp frontend. Git is written in C. Mercurial is written in Python. Monotone is in C==, SVN is in C?

There's not much from Ruby on here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software and part of the manifesto is to change that.

briefly mentioned

Ruby Sinatra http://www.sinatrarb.com/

Ruby merb http://merbivore.com/documentation.html

Amp will be somewhat like ActiveRecord? In that it translates...

Talking about the rebuilding of Rails 3 around modularization. Common api to things.

Showing off the ability to modify/rename commands. Also looking @ code.

This is using Trollop. What's Trollop? http://trollop.rubyforge.org/ "A commandline parser for Ruby that gets out of your way. "

Discuss billing command parsing... "estimate time spent" How many ppl here just understood those last few slides? (about implementing billing estimate using amp)?

in amp, a command will be defined as a class. Can use Ruby built-in modules to customize commands. (hwa?)

git output- not standardized. Many problems. Get around this by amp-grit instead of amp-git? http://grit.rubyforge.org/

I would like to see the version of the manifesto. Link?

There's a guy w a fancy camera taking pics. I want a camera like that. I wonder where the pics will be posted?

Questions:

Q svn will be supported?

yes. problem yet to be tackled. svn workflow is very different... haven't addressed problem yet.

Q what distinguishes amp? what makes you choose it over Hg? or a different system?

It's a general system. Well, it will be a general system. "Ignore the ppl who don't care right now."

"This is my RubyConf talk, I have to add 15min to it, so give me suggestions.

To present at one of these things, talk to chicagoruby.org via email.

Elephant and Castle now.

ChicagoRuby Meetup at ThoughtWorks

http://www.meetup.com/ChicagoRuby/calendar/13617890/

Oct. 5, 2010

6-8pm

Presentation 1:

Jasmine for JavaScript testing: probably better than what you've been using.

http://blog.michaelphines.net/using-jasmine-on-rails-3

Presentation 2:

New application: http://gathers.us/ for event management.

By the way, Obtiva is hiring. Ask the presenter about it at http://twitter.com/#!/ethangunderson

"The rails community really loves Mongo- they love basically everything that is new and shiny-"

His presentation includes the Picard facehand. Picture. I like this guy.

"It just works! It's all ponies and stuff. That's actually a really terrible idea, I think... ORMs are worthless if you don't understand what they're doing."

MongoMapper and Mongoid. (These do what they wanted to do but they didn't use them because of the above quote?)

"Mongo isn't single-server durable." has to do with write path. Must have at least two notes in a cluster for durability.

"Our adventure in data modeling: "

Option 1- separate events and groups. bad idea. option 2- embed events in groups. but this is a bad idea because there's a limited doc size. 4mb limit! "It's so people like us don't do thinkgs like that."

Practical limit is 100-500k, depending who you ask. Because tossing that repeatedly across the network is just irrational.

option 3- sngle collection inheritance. Worked well, but learned; if you migrate into it, the old events don't have a Type attribute, so you need to backfill that or everything will misclassify itself.

noSQL = "screw you, DBAs!" (but not so much...)

Register at chicagodb.com for an event hosted by Obtiva on oct 18th.

Mongo Chicago IIT Oct 20th.

Go to spkr8.com/t/4704 to review his presentation.

GHC: Tuesday! (job fair)

Pics here: http://picasaweb.google.com/wordymusic/GHC10Tues#

31 pics, creative commons. email me at wordymusic@gmail.com if you want something taken down or want something that you think was taken to be uploaded.

It's going to be even more crowded tomorrow. Today was just the job fair; tomorrow all the industry professionals will be here, and it will be epic. I remember this from last time.

My hotel room wifi is pretty atrocious: it's ranging from 40ms ping to 120 ms ping, and from .78Mb down to .25Mb down- which is to say, not as good as the internet that I was getting on the plane ride here. So I'm sad about that, but it's not like I have time to watch videos, so I guess it's okay. Also I think that bandwidth was much higher this afternoon because not so many people were on it... which tells you a lot about the network configuration, actually.

All three of my roommates are asleep right now, so I'll try to be brief. (And disjointed, because I took notes sporadically throughout the day.)

This evening around 8:30, I went to the Hard Rock Cafe with Mariya (roommate) and two people from her university, and we chatted and chatted... turns out that they're all three PhD students! (I just finished my undergrad degree.) So that was interesting. I drank some margarita that the bartender came up with- pomegranate and melon, I think? It was tasty but very mild.

This morning at 12:30pm (dude, it was totally morning), I reported to my Hopper shift! I signed in, picked up a red vest, met my fellow Hopper Juliana, and hung around the poster table until three pm, talking everyone's ears off. Juliana is awesome- goes to UW (giant university in Seattle- an order of magnitude more undergrads than IIT) as an aerospace engineering major (actually, a pseudonym of that) and her mom works for Microsoft and has been trying to get her to come for years...

I considered begging an introduction to her mother, but I'm not sure that I want to use .NET all that badly. .NET is a lovely lovely program, but it has a high learning curve, which I am currently on the wrong end on. And frankly, Ruby is more fun. Hell, Java, C, and C# are more fun. I wouldn't know about FORTRAN, never having used it.

Sorry Juliana, if I embarrassed you. Watch me do it to other people now too!

While I was being a Hopper, I met this lovely older lady who's one of the official photographers for GHC10! I showed her my Rebel xT and she told me that she was a Nikon lady... actually that her favorite cameras were this German line of hardware that's 3x more expensive than anything whatsoever... and she told us an excellent story about when she spoke to her granddaughter's highschool photography class and told the teacher that he(?) was full of shit for teaching darkroom techniques but not Photoshop. I love it when industry professionals tell off teachers.

There was a man who works at the Hyatt who, after he walked up to us (at the poster table) and conversed with us re: a pile of boxes to be taken away, the first thing that came out of my mouth after he was out of earshot was "He... has a very purposeful stride." It was very brisk. There are actors somewhere in Hollywood who wish that they could do that.

Moving on. Some nice lady came up to me, said "Are you Linda?" and proceeded to tell me that she was "geekettebits" and I said "Oh yeah, I friended you this morning." Man, I <3 geekettebits ="=">

"My attention span is about three clicks long." That's in my notes. Not sure where it came from.

As I was sitting at the table, Zara and Rachel came by wearing a massive amount of Google swag, and chatted for a bit about work at Google and all that. Apparently the guy in the wraparound black and white Google t-shirt is the marketing guy, is named Damien, and ran the meeting at which they discussed what kinds of swag to have...

I met Yang, who is a Hopper and is presenting two posters! As far as i could understand, one of them is on paralell computing with biotech (to, or with? I don't know) and the other is on how to do a server migration while also using parallel computing (is that a solved problem, or still under debate, or...?) ...Anyway, I plan to go check out the posters and take pics and generally be very impressed. I'm theoretically doing a poster next year... depends on co-authors and research outcomes.

By about 5:30pm, I had talked myself hoarse. So I got some mints and a bottle of water and kept talking. I was the girl in the purple shirt who talked your ear off. Yep, that was me. Follow me on twitter (wordymusic) so I can do it there too.

My roommate Mariya worked a summer at some cloud computing company called Scaleright or Rightsize or something- lots of details, very cool-sounding. Man, there are so many places that it would be cool to work at!

I was planning to do a detailed blog with pictures about the swag bag, but it's past midnight and I'm going to be up before 7am tomorrow, so instead I'm planning to do an end-of-conference swag post about everything that I pick up all week.

By the way, the object persistence framework Hibernate is rocking my reading list right now. It's so cool! I'm going to set up a mini implementation. ...But not tonight. For the love of little green Poken, not tonight.

I went and got my Poken! Had to pay $15 for it, since I'm not actually a student any more (barely!) and I chose the little green one with three eyes... so cute! I used it several times today, so it's totally worth what I paid. I haven't set up the online account yet, but I'll probably do that tonight. I hear that it might be a little complex...?

Next to the Poken table, there was a table with hardware on it. Which I looked at and went "ooooh!" because I used to assemble stuff like that, so I asked the guy sitting there what it did. It turns out that his name is Spencer, and he had two smartphones, some hard-wired switches, some radios, and two step-down power devices so radio 1 wouldn't short out radio 2 at such close range... and his company Rayetheon is making a system so that mobile phones are usable in war zones (unmodified cell phones are very locatable and therefore dangerous/useless in the field). We talked for a while and he gave me pieces of paper and we discussed Fort Worth and the programs there... I'm not sure that the commute would agree with me, but they're doing some rocking things over there. I like travel, but not between coffee and meetings. More like between where I am and somewhere interesting.

Ended up having dinner (meh, box dinner wraps) with TeeTee from IIT and some people that I just met... fun times!

I stopped by the opensource table but it was full up, so I headed out. I'll totally be back, though.

I should look at some of the grad school tables, since it's possible that I'll be gradschooling relatively soon.

On Friday from 3-4pm I'll be at a lecture by someone from ThoughtWorks - it looks interesting! Also increases my chances of being employed, sent to India for training, and being generally incredibly happy. (I've never been to India! Dangling a free international trip in front of me motivates me impressively.)

I ended up talking to some excellent people from the Xetron division of Northrop Grumman, which is the company that all of my engineer friends slaver to work at... and it sounds like it's pretty excellent over there, so I'll definitely talk to their website and forms and all that and see if anything comes of it. (Because how cool would it be if I could help some of my friends get jobs? Like, just by telling them that they should bloody apply, because I work there. That would be rocking.)

I talked to... some company whose logo looks like Picasa's, and whose acronym sounds like the "jitsu" part of ju-jitsu... anyway, not seriously considering working there, mostly because they sound like they're kinda stiff in general- but I was talking to one of their HR people about their fiberoptic cable network analysis hardware and I would really really like to talk to one of their technical people about how that all works because I'm a brat with an oversized curiosity. I'll poke their website and see what there is to be seen...

And I talked to other companies but frankly it's getting towards 1am and you don't care anyway, so au revoir.

I was so good at the job fair that I only have one resume left. Gotta stop by the Kinkos upstairs tomorrow- not that I really need so many more, but they're nice to have.

And the codeathon is Thurs afternoon! Come. I will be there, writing bugs. (Code is by definition a series of bugs, right?) http://eden.sahanafoundation.org/wiki/GHC2010

I have the feeling that my post-conference followup will take weeks.

Dammit, one of my roommates is snoring. I won't tell you which one.

First ZOMG GHC moment

So at IIT last week I was chatting with a nice lady from ThoughtWorks, and we talked about how we'd both be at GHC soon (and there was amazement over that!).

So I'm sitting in the lobby because I'm not checked into a room yet (long story) and she walks up to me with a coworker and says hi! And he have a happy enthusiastic conversation about the programming books we're all reading, and my network analysis on the plane wifi, and the t-shirt that she gave me that I modded. And she's going to send me "the survey" which is part of the potential-hire process. And I am extraordinarily happy because this makes THREE companies that have me on round two of their hiring process!

It still remains to be seen whether any of them will hire me. I'm actually financially decent for now, although I would really love a change in circumstances. And I fully expect to find amazing possibilities at the GHC fair. Getting paid to do what I consider fun? I could be so lucky!