As Kaizenconf approaches I need to reflect on where I stand currently and where I want to be in the short and long term, career wise and skill wise.
Already the benefits of a conference that asks its participants to either teach or learn and to come up with discussion subjects are showing themselves. With people from all over the world, everybody way smarter than I am, I cannot waste this opportunity to learn. LEARN! My thirst for knowledge it literary killing me! It hurts to know you don't know anything!
I am 31 and I don't know shit. I will not let this stand!
This is why I am so happy to be able to attend Kaizenconf.
Anyway, I decided recently that I would move my team to use Agile methodologies and in the process learn as much about it as I can about it and gain a deep understanding of the philosophy behind it in order to be able to adapt properly to different contexts and situations.
So far, my first step has been to introduce source control to our team. It still blows my mind that it wasn't used in on an everyday basis. Everybody knew what it did, but they thought that since nobody would ever work on the same web page at the same time, we didn't need it. I started using Subversion for my own projects and started slowly to push it to my team mates. Then my boss decided to buy Microsoft Team Foundation Server and told us to use that.
Okay, not the exact victory I wanted, but still a victory, right? I got them to use some form of source control. The winds of change have started blowing and once I got any kind of momentum, other changes I'd like to make will be easier to implement.
But there's a lot of resistance to change. My colleagues have been stuck in a Classic ASP world for too long, developing individually, our projects being small and simple with no architectural design whatsoever. Over the years, new features were patched on top of old ones and employee IDs were hard coded in the source code, all in the name of speedy development to make our customers happy, the said customers being users in other departements.
As time went by, code duplication started running rampant and bad coding practices became bad habits.
I came in a year ago and finally, just a few months ago, sneaked in an ASP.Net application in the mix, slightly opening the door to the wonderful world of automation, unit tests, deployment and all other things that most of you are probably accustomed to.
The next step in my strategy is to use Asp.Net more and more. Already, somebody on my team is going to a five day training on .Net 3.5, so things are going according to plan so far!
Eventually, I want to automate our building and deployment process, incorporate unit tests and get started on Domain Driven Design and Domain Specific Languages and anything else that would benefit my company that I can learn from this day onwards.
The immediate next step, however, will be to sell to my team the virtues of Sandboxing. Even though we are implementing some form of source control, my boss still wants us to all work from a shared folder on the development server because he's afraid that code that resides on our machines might be destroyed if a hard disks fails, for example. Sigh... I can tell the hill will be steep to climb.
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So where am I and where do I want to be? I want to be good at what I do and I to do that I cannot accept the status quo. I will lead my team and adopt agile methodologies and in the process learn as much as I can.
Who knows, maybe one day I'll lead other teams to do similar things in the manufacturing world.
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