I handed in my notice today, and so have marked the beginning of the end of my employment at Threadneedle.

I've been there for three years now, and a lot has happened over those years, and I can safely say that I've got an awful lot out of my time there.

But times change, business changes, and I have changed. And now it's time to move on.

I feel I have contributed a lot to the development team at threads during my time there and hope that they continue to improve the way software is delivered to the business there. And I hope that the development team will get the appreciation and investment in them that they need, to enable them to be more effective.

When I started the build process was literally hit F5 and go collect the contents of the bin\debug directory and copy over the network for the release management team to hand to the deployment team. Talk about the dark ages. Third party dependency management was complete mess, and there was no assembly versioning of any thing. Nothing would build straight out of VSS (yes, you read correctly, Visual Source Safe) as the projects would reference libraries in random places over peoples hard drives. The entirety of the solution's folder structure would be checked in, including the bin and obj directories, and there wasn't a single label in VSS, not one, so recovering source of an assembly from some time ago relied on you rolling back individual files to roughly the date you were after. And that all depended on whether or not the history actually existed at all, as the repository currently stands at 19GB (YES GIGABYTES) and has never had Analyze and Fix run on it. Nice.

Notice how I've not yet mentioned anything about the code yet.

The build process is such a fundamental thing to making software I can't believe any development team that is producing any kind of software hasn't already nailed this. But unfortunately every place I've worked in to date hasn't, and I've spent my time fixing it. It's not something I like doing, this is something that some one else should have done a long time ago, long before I arrived.

But happily each place I've worked in now has a reliable, automated build process. Happy days.

Not only do they have a build process, they also now have a continuous integration server, configured with continuous, nightly and on demand builds of all of the projects I've worked on, and most of the others as well.

Progress.

They also have a reference ASP.Net MVC app that has been developed using DDD with 80% unit test coverage, all done in a BDD style. The only thing I wish I could have done there was some automated acceptance tests with something like ruby and cucumber, as one of the killers is the total lack of automated integration tests, so regression testing means a manual execution of test scripts, which pushes out the customer feed back cycle and cripples the ability to deliver. But hey, it's a start.

For a good four months I ran weekly developer screen casts for the rest of the development team, giving them a choice of three videos to watch and letting them vote on one of them. I gave this up after a while as I was getting depressed at the turn outs, and lack of interest and debate. But they were great while they lasted, and the 'brand name' even made it out in the wild when me and Neil Robbins got together and put one on for the London community.

I've grown as much as I can in Threadneedle and it's got to the stage where I'm not improving any more, and I don't like that feeling. I like learning, I like new challenges, I like new mountains to climb. I need to be continuously improving.

Onward and upward.

Watch this space for more details.

I've been very unhappy in my job role at work for the past 11 months. At the start of the year I was selected to attend an ETL training course and have since been exclusively allocated to ETL projects at work, and have not seen a single curly brace or semi colon outside of my own pet projects all year.

Not good.

I really don't like not liking my job, and these feelings toward my current role have been some what alien to me as I've enjoyed almost all of all of the other jobs I've ever had. Every job has its moments, obviously, you know, strikes and gutters and all that, but spending 11 months not enjoying what I was doing really should have given me the kick in the arse to GTFO and get another job. But it didn't.

Things have come very close to boiling point a few times, but because of the current economic climate (and a few other bits 'n' bobs) I haven't been actively looking for a new job at all. Not yet anyway. But it was getting very very close.

A light at the end of the tunnel appeared a few weeks ago when there was a mention of an Application Architect role becoming available which would span the development team and the architecture team bridging the gap and bringing the two teams closer together. Previously architecture has sat completely separate from development, not just structurally, but also physically, which just doesn't work.

Today I accepted the role of Application Architect!

I'll go into more details soon.

Watch this space!

i've never developed an asp.net site, i've been a desktop application developer for my entire career. i've developed a classic asp site, in fact www.jobshy.com still runs on the primative cms system with a mysql backend that i wrote in it YEARS back and even www.frogdreaming.com used the same classic asp application too.

actually thinking about it i did a fair bit of classic asp development cus i wrote all the various web sites of my first employer, but at the time asp.net surfaced, i was really into the desktop development in vb6, writing automation software and device drivers for various bits of kit, and it just totally passed me by. also at that early stage of my professional life i didn't realise how important continuous improvment was, and didn't learn asp.net. as the years and the development went by, and i started learning .net, i was still focused on the desktop apps and didn't touch any web development, and still haven't to this day.

to be honest about it, the few times that i did look into web development it scared the hell out of me. my classic asp background worked in a very stateless way (read, very basic! - but thats how the web works right?!) and all the asp.net gumph to simulate the winforms environment i was used to just seamed like a total kop out, and i just never bothered to get up to speed with it. this quote from rob conery sums up what i think about asp.net webforms development: 

The Great Lie 

WebForms is a lie. It’s abstraction wrapped in deception covered in lie sauce presented on a plate full of diversion and sleight of hand. Nothing you do with Webforms has anything to do with the web – you let it do the work for you.

i was employed at my current place as more of a backend developer, i've done a lot of database and windows services programming over the past two years (am i'm not happy about that) and so when asked to provide a ui for this new project that i'm working on i shuddered at the thought of having to implement it in asp.net webforms. i'm not an asp.net guy, and if i'm made to develop this ui using it...well, i'd hate to be the poor so who would have to support and extend it, because i'm certian i would make some nasty school boy errors.

so what are my options? wpf browser app? silverlight?

nah...mvc!

the first chapter of professional asp.net mvc that scottgu posted up is wicked. i've worked all the way through it and what's great about it is that it covers the generation of an entire app from file > new project.

its got me really excited about doing some web development now, and i'm currently in the middle of knocking up some prototypes of the ui i need to deliver in the next few weeks.

and i really becoming a web guy?

it's official, the change has begun.

the move from application to integration development was announced yesterday in a team meeting and in the weekly update. it's all over the press!

i knew this move was coming, the signs have been there for a long time (biztalk/informatica/etc) and although i think there is real need for this type of development in the place i work, i believe that there is still a real need for application development, and that need has been dressed down far too much.

that opinion is not totally founded on the fact that i am an application developer and not a systems integrator, there is a need for apps to be built to deliver value to the business, to get those quick wins in these hard 'climate crunching' times, and we are the only ones that can do that, not system integrators.

don't get me wrong, there is also a need to sort out all the crazy data mess that we have gotten our selves in to here too, i just pray that the powers that be do not overlook the need for us 'real' devs ;)

i'm not a integration monkey, i'm a coding monkey. with an opinion.

for some strange reason i've been thinking quite a lot recently about starting to blog again, so much so i decided last week to start up shift-in.com as a development only blog, following my adventures in coding. and as soon as the first post went up i really wanted to start writing about other things that are going on in my life at the moment.

i really want to keep shift-in.com purely about software development, and not about the other things that are going on in my life at the moment, so i really needed a place to start to vent all those things that do not belong on the development blog, although i anticipate them crossing over from time to time.

the major thing that kicked my arse into starting to write this right now was something that happened at work today. something that i think at least to some degree will change me in the coming months.

the funny thing is that as i write this i'm still not too sure where this content should live. i'm still very much in love with jobshy.com, and i'll have that domain until the day i die i'm sure, but a lot of people know about that, and since the start of this year i've felt restricted in what i can write on there. i need some where else to vent. i love recording the things i've been doing and thinking, it helps me concrete the memories and rationalise about them, and as i'm far more proficient with a keyboard than i am with a pen and paper, this is my outlet. but where does this text belong?

i'm going to put this up in a hidden location under jobshy.com until such time as i get some more inspiration. at least that way i can update it from anywhere, and thats the point about having one of these things.

today was a funny day. last friday night after work at the pub a more senior member of staff told me to keep an eye out for an email or two, as there was some rather large news on the way. with the whole climate crunch in full swing right now, thats no surprise.

well at 0945 this morning we got the email from the executive director that there will be inevitable redundancies as a result of the current 'climate crunch', we then, not 15 minutes later, got the follow up from our department (i.t.) head saying the same thing, then 10 minutes after that all the developers got a meeting request with the head of i.t. wicked.

obviously a lot of thoughts start circulating around in your head about what we are going to be told, but you know what? i'm not fussed about the final out come. truth to be told my job is not taking me anywhere i want to go anyway, and if i was to be let go it would be a blessing in disguise.

'we are not a software house' is what i'm repeatably told on almost a weekly basis. however, just because we are not churning out, off the shelf large software solutions does not in any way mean that you can side step the fundamentals of software analysis, design, development, testing and delivery. and for some odd reason, so far this company has thought they could, and even in my short time (18 months) of being there i've seen it come back and bite us time and time again.

since being there i've introduced versioning, unit testing, mocking frameworks, build scripts, automated builds, design patterns, and god knows what else...you know what, before i got there there wasn't even a single label in vss (i know, i know, i'm working on getting rid of vss), how can you seriously say you're a professional developer and you dont even know what the concept of a tag or a label is all about?

am i worried about the news that we were brought today? no. and thats not because i dont think i'm going to be one of those that gets made redundant. on the contrary, i think i might well be one of the (un)fortunate. but if i am, its the long over due start of a new chapter, this one has been dragging on.

p.s. i've decided that this is close enough to development that i am actually going to put it up on shift-in.com.