Tim Retout's www presence

Weekend of change

Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

After two and a half years at Smoothwall, I'm moving on - Friday is my last day. Since I joined the development team, we have adopted Agile development, set up a pretty nifty Gerrit/Jenkins code review + integration system, and introduced dpkg for package management. Along the way, I helped with a bunch of important features for the business, like a ground-up rewrite of the web filter, and time-based browsing usage quotas.

I will be starting at CV-Library on Monday, for a whole new set of challenges. They're based in Fleet, so I'll have an hour-long commute each way on the train.

I've been assured by an expert in these matters that facilitating wage slavery is a comparatively more ethical pursuit than facilitating internet censorship. :)

To make the commute somewhat more bearable, I'm moving house on Saturday. So far, the packing's going quite well...

Posted: 11 Apr 2012 22:27 | Tags: work

Software Architect

I've been promoted - my job title will now be 'Software Architect'. This seems to mean I'll be writing documents rather than code - any higher-level, and I'd need Mark Shuttleworth's spacesuit. Is this a good thing? Anyway, I celebrated by opening my last bottle of Debian wine.

<spam>Unfortunately, I can't take up my new role until we have hired a replacement. UK-based developers who know Perl and ideally PostgreSQL might want to look at the job description, although I'd recommend sending your CV and covering letter to me directly. I don't get a referral bonus, it's just that I don't like what that agency does with your carefully-crafted application.</spam>

I'd like to thank everyone who maintains LaTeX for their assistance in this matter.

In other news, I'm studying a couple of Open University courses part-time - one on software development (i.e. UML), and one on interaction design. They're going well so far - I've had a couple of tutorials, and the first part of an assignment came back with good marks.

I've been reading the Lean Software Development books by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. They seem to put Agile development into a 'respectable' historical context of similar improvements in manufacturing, which might be useful for persuading project managers.

Posted: 06 Mar 2011 23:52 | Tags: work

Work

Today I wore a tie to work, and told everyone it was "dress up Friday". Of course, this has been done before.

At lunch most of the office was together at the pub, celebrating a software release. I had an entertaining discussion with the Technical Director about how our next major version should be developed - we disagree. But it seems I've convinced several key people of the merits of basing our work on a third-party distribution, so that looks promising.

Stepping back a moment, I'm quite pleased with the changes I've been able to make since joining the company ten months ago. There's always more to be done, of course - but it's satisfying to make a difference.

Posted: 25 Jun 2010 21:06 | Tags: work