I lost my job a couple weeks ago. It wasn't such a bad thing since I was trying already job hunting. Of course, I was hoping to have a new job lined up before leaving. The good news is that loosing my job allowed me to switch to full time job hunting, focussing on networking with recruiters and getting interviews. I did learn a few things in the process.

First, you should not wait until you are in need of a job before networking. My regular attendance to the local Java Users Groups and other geek gatherings turned out to be very helpful. I got a few very good leads through people that I met at the Boulder and Denver JUGs. It also helped getting access to recruiters since my name was already familiar to a few.

Second is that Holidays aren't such a bad time to look for work. Yes, many people are taking vacation time. Many are hiring managers actively looking for people to fill positions. Others are the recruiters that they are talking to. There are still many actively looking. The first few days on the hunt were filled with calls to recruiters, returning calls to recruiters and even a phone interview. Even a blizzard didn't quite stop the activity.

Third, that Holidays can limit the opportunities you have access to. A applied to a few interesting positions through friends, only to learn that the hiring managers would be in vacation for up to a few weeks. I therefore had to make a choice: would I be willing to wait for the manager to come back? Should I pass on good, solid opportunities in order to wait for the managers or HR to contact me? Truth is that I realized that I really wanted to get back to work even after a few days of unemployment.

Finally, know what and where you are looking for. I got many calls from recruiters who wanted me to apply to positions in the DTC, in Chicago and even one in Arizona. Living in Thornton would have made all of these a little difficult to get to. So I was insistent that I was looking for work within a certain geographical area of Denver. I also had to decide early on what kind of work I was looking for. I did apply to Google and other high tech startups, but I didn't fare so well. Turns out that having a computer sciences degree was very important to the recruiters. So I did change my focus to target positions where having a CS degree wasn't so critical.

So, through the holidays and a couple snow storms I ended up receiving an offer from TransZap. TransZap is a small company based in downtown Denver focussing on providing billing services to the oil and gas industry. I was impressed by the people that I met through the interview and I did like their pragmatic approach to the development process. I'll be joining TransZap on January 3rd. This looks like a solid company, with a good product and good people. I am excited to join such a team.

It seems an eternity ago. I hadn't begun kindergarden yet. We were living in a fairly large (or it seemed at the time) development complex in Laval, near Montreal. I still had training wheels on my bicycle. Many of my friends were rid of their training wheels. I wanted be just like them, riding a bicycle without the training wheels. I did convince a friend to let me try to ride his bike, and after a few false starts I was riding his bike. After a few days, my mom did notice that I was doing ok, and soon the training wheels came off.

Now, what does this childhood story has to do with agile development? I think of agile methodologies such as Scrum and XP as training wheels for teams and developers. The goal is to teach good habits and provide guidance and support as the team and its developers mature and gain experience. As they move forward, the methods, practices and dictums associated with the Agile methodologies become ingrained and the team is (hopefully) able to adapt them to their situation. They begin to ride the big kid bike.

Sometimes though, businesses, teams and even developers want to go straight to the end result of Agile development. They want the benefits associated with being an agile team without the discipline and structure that comes from following one of the many flavors of Agile development. They don't want the training wheels, they want to go straight to the big kid bike. Sometime they succeed, but often they don't.

Thankfully, OpenLogic is committed to being an agile company. We are implementing Scrum and are adopting more agile practices and methods as time goes by. We did have our own falls and scraped knees. We were able to look back, identify where we fell short and remedy the situation. Today, we have our product owner and other stake-holders attending our stand up meetings, we do put time into writing both acceptance and automated unit tests for our stories. We also pay close attention to our velocity, which we then use to adjust our tasks estimates.

In many ways, we still have our training wheels. But we are getting better at it. With a little time and practice we may one day be ready to get rid of them though.

[posted with ecto]

I spent the week at JavaOne, mostly manning the OpenLogic booth. We had a really good turn out, got a lot of potential leads and handed out a lot of t-shirts. I also had the opportunity to walk the pavilion a few times, get some swag and even attended a session.

The first impression I got of the conference was the first general session. It happened to be the first time that Jonathan took the stage as CEO of Sun Microsystems. I must admit that I know understand why I usually watched them as a webcast. I felt a little under whelmed by the whole presentation. It was mostly marketing fluff. I guess I wasn't the only one that felt that way since you could see groups of attendees streaming out the door.

I made my way to the pavilion right after the session ended. I was on the first booth duty shift, and I got a quick orientation on the booth itself, on how to use the lead scanner and on the different pieces of marketing that we had. The pavilion opened and the attendees started to stream in. The day turned into a blur of giving the quick marketing spiel, scanning badges, asking qualifying questions and handing over t-shirts. I must say that we had amazing t-shirts.

I did attend the "Future of Spring" presentation given by Rod Johnson. Rod was good, his presentation had a lot of good information about Spring 2.0. It is amazing how many people attended this session. It was given in one of the biggest session rooms available. So it was me and 800 or so of my closest Java programmer friends. Quite a shock after getting used to the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour where a popular session my have 50 people in it.

We co-sponsored the Geronimo Live! party with Virtuas. LogicBlaze and a few other companies. It was a great party, was very well attended and had a really nice swag bag. We had a t-shirt in the swag bag, and it got a lot of great comments.

I must say that the best part of the trip itself was the food. After a long day of standing on hard concrete, playing marketoids and handing t-shirt, we certainly went out and treated ourselves to the excellent dining experiences available around the hotel. Two meals that stand out happened to be on Thursday. I had lunch in a tea house located right above the Moscone center. This was an oasis of peace in the middle of a very busy and crowded area. It also had wonderful food. I had the moorish tea service. It was a really nice break in the middle of the day.

The next one was a sushi dinner at Sanraku. The food was excellent, and I had a great time hanging with the developers that came to help with the conference. We had plenty of sashimi, nigiri, maki rolls and (of course) sake. I tried unfiltered sake for the first time. It was certainly different from what I am used, but it was good and it is certainly something worth trying again in the future.

Overall, it was a good trip. There was a lot of hard work and a lot of good fun. I am glad that I am on the way home though. It's going to be a slow weekend for me :)

We just got Slashdotted after eWeek published a story on our Expert Community Program.

Here's a short story that I can share now that I do work at OpenLogic :)

After my phone interview with Eric Weidner (co-founder and Engineering Lead), I was assigned a take home test: write a small Java program that would act as a calculator. I was to email it back to Eric as soon as I was done. I worked on it over the weekend, and sent it over on the Tuesday following the assignment. I then started to wait for a response back.

I still hadn't heard anything back by Thursday and started to be worried.

I was really nervous by Friday. So I gathered courage and gave Eric a call. He looked around in his inbox but couldn't find the email. So he started digging in his mail folders and found it (to my great relief) in his Spam folder. The homework was reviewed, and it did lead to an in-person interview with the engineering team, which lead to a job offer.

So you have it: the Spam filter ate my homework.

I often wondered how my last day at Sun would go. Would I leave with a big bang? Or would I rather leave quietly? Would I make a happy dance outside of the door? How would I feel driving out of the campus? What about when I drove by the campus, as I do every day now that I work at OpenLogic?

Last Friday started pretty good. I got up, went through my morning routine, had coffee. I was smiling big throughout. It was going to be a good day. I thought about leaving a little early, maybe stopping by Village Tavern and have a martini before heading home. I drove to the Broomfield campus, listening to music and enjoying the drive. I even sung to some of the songs on my iPod.

Once at the office, I worked with Ravi to answer some more of his questions, attended my last standing meeting and development team meeting. I worked with Ravi to figure out what was causing issues with the Sun Update Services Delivery Server (found a couple configuration issues). By the time I was done, it was 5:00 PM. So much for leaving early...

So I gathered my stuff, dropped an envelope with my badge, Enigma card, Securid FOB and corporate American Express card in the interoffice mail. Chatted with one last person on my way out and stepped out the door. I had done it, I had done through my last day as a Sun employee.

So, what did I do? What was the answer to the questions above?

I smiled, whispered "Freedom" and headed to my car. I finally waved good bye as I drove off the Broomfield campus.

It was indeed a good day.

It's official since I got an offer today and turned in my resignation to my manager at Sun. I will be joining OpenLogic on April 3rd, working with the likes of Scott Davis, Rod Cope and Stormy Peters as a Senior Software Engineer. The time was right, the opportunity is right and the team is amazing. I am very much looking forward to work with them. It should be quite exciting.

In the mean time, I have to transfer my responsibility over to other team members at Sun and ensure that I transfer as much information as I can to the remaining people. Giving my notice was a unnerving experience, but it had to be done right? I must say that I am dreading tomorrow a little since my director is going to be in Broomfield, quite ready to try to convince me to stay. But it's time to go. I certainly wish the best of luck and success to my teammates at Sun.

I was reading this article on Creating Passionate Users, and I realized that this was yet another good reason to work from home rather than to work from the office.

At work, all of the offices look the same. Even those with windows. Sure, people do decorate their offices, but there is a not too much that can be done to create a playful environment to stimulate the brain.

At home, I create a stimulating environment by listening to music, have some toys around or even repaint my home office with no complaints from

• facilities
• co-workers
• management

It's my house after all, and I can do almost anything I want with it.

Quite often, I would feel like I was caged in while working in my assigned office. I could look across the aisle and see an identical office to mine. Granted, I shouldn't complain too much since I had an actual office with a sliding door to muffle the noises. Still, it wasn't the most stimulating environment around.

Working from home is great :)