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.