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.