It’s been a long, cold stormy winter. Snow day after snow day all thru the second half of January, all of February and even three more snowfalls the first week of March. Enough already! And then suddenly two or three days ago the sun came out and the temperature rose above freezing. Now the snowpiles have dimished from five feet high to three feet, and you can even see a bit of lawn here and there. On the other hand, the remaining snow is black slush from hell and the potholes are in full bloom. Still, it feel like spring is finally here!
I spent most of the winter intensely busy at work. My previous project ended around the new year, and now I’m making the next-generation content management platform. It’s a whole new technology stack, with HTML5, AngularJS, JSON, Git, Gulp, Lint, Less, Vagrant, Karma, Protractor, with Scala and Akka on the middle tier, and lots of other good stuff. Also a major upgrade to our processes and best practices, including full-on test-driven development and continuous deployment and integration. So there’s been a lot to put together and come up to speed on in a short time. We also have a new and expanded team, including four people from my old group and three new guys with more one the way.
Our team is distributed, with guys in Italy, Poland, Nova Scotia, New Jersey, Queens and Westchester, so I’ve been working from home alot more. We have daily video conferences that include GIT pull requests, code reviews and design and planning sessions, which sometime go on for a half a day. Been also putting in alot of late nights and weekends. Still, I guess the best way to learn something new is to jump in the deep end with full immersion. It looks like I’m past the steepest part of the learning curve now. We have a big milestone demo coming up a couple weeks and it looks like we’ll actually get there.