Another personal update
Almost one year ago I started again as an independent consultant, after five years in Sourcesense/XPeppers. How’s it going?
I have worked with great customers. They are all good places to work, both technically and from the point of view of the fundamental values: first of all, respect. (If you’re a good Java, C#, Php or Ruby programmer and you could be interested in working for one, just ask me.)
What value do I bring to these customers? What kind of work do I do?
When I do my best work, I look for the biggest problem and keep working on it, trying different solutions until it gets better (a simple recipe that I learned from Pascal.) It’s not always clear what the biggest problem is, but mostly I look for things that are out of sync with what an Agile team should do. Two chief things to look for:
- How often do we ship?
- Are the customers (business owners, CEO, other stakeholders) happy? (Which requires sometimes to have difficult conversations)
Actually, I don’t really invent or apply the solutions myself; I try to get the organization’s people to do that. This makes it far more likely that the solutions make sense and work :-)
I’ve been fairly busy, and this is why I didn’t write here for a long time. Right now I’m happy with the way it’s going.