So it's been a long time since I've update this here ol blog. It's been an intense 4 months and there's so much to discuss but it's too late for all of that. For now, I'm going to provide a snapshot of what I'm doing right now. I'm afraid this post is inspired by 30 minutes on the eliptical and a recent viewing of Lord of the Rings.

I am priveleged to be a part of a fairly new offering by ThoughtWorks. The project is for a large telecom and I am part of the Build & Release team.

What is Build & Release

The release aspect of software is a world that many companies do not know how to do well. Heck, even the documentation on releasing software is unknown and is a domain that has been a hot topic as of late. It's one thing to build software, it's another challenge actually pushing the system to production (and repeatedly and reliably).

Right now I'm working with a brilliant group of ThoughtWorkers providing guidance to a software project of over 150 people and over a dozen project silos which need to eventually integrate with each other.

How/Why did I get on the team?

Because the acronym is BAR! Kidding of course. I actually resisted the push to go on this team. I'm a developer and that's what I wanted to do. Or so I thought...

In a lengthy e-mail I revealed to a friend that I might be missing opportunities to utilize my strengths. I reflected on the fact that I played with computers for 10 years (not my strength) before I even started programming! What did I do instead? Figured out how to tweak DOS to get my games to freakin run! I unintentialy became a pretty good troubleshooter. I even started building computers and selling them on the side, and learned how to figure out hardware issues as well. Even when coding, some of what I enjoyed the most was debugging complicated bugs. Figuring out a memory leak in the CBC Radio 3 metadata service using memory dumps was a memorable accomplishment.

How does that relate to build & release? Almost all my tasks will be related to things not working right and figuring out what's gone wrong. I won't be writing one iota of code that delivers business value, but I'll write code that's fun and challenging nevertheless.

What's my role?

Here's where the Lord of the Rings comment comes in. For the last few weeks I haven't actually done much. I sort of feel like Gandalf in that he really didn't do much either. His role was not to take down the Dark Lord (I dare not say his name) himself, but to organize multiple different roles and make them work as effectively as possible. Occasionally he would drop hints like telling Aragorn to go through the Paths of the Dead.

Ok, I'll drop the analogy before it becomes too nerdy, but the reason I compare myself to Gandalf (not just because he's awesome) is because I feel like my presense on this project is to be an influencer. To bring people on separate projects to talk to each other because they may have a common problem. To observe system wide issues and bring people together in an open forum to discuss them (Council of Elrond?).

In the last few weeks I've build relationships with the other teams and am proud to say that I may even influence how they do things. If anything, I got them vocalizing their problems a lot more so that we on the B&R team and tackle them before they become massive integration issues.

I'll probably be at this for a bit and will eventually dive into stuff that's more technical; I started writing PowerShell scripts today for example, but my role still as a support person. It's going to be an interesting year.