I’ve now been in my new job a full week. So far so good. Here’s some rough thoughts:

• The commute is better than expected. I typically get the 0744 train from St. Albans to Blackfriars and after that it is a 10-15 minute walk. This will get even better in December when the Bankside entrance to Blackfriars opens. Coming home I normally get the 1736 back. The total commute is about an hour each way.
• I get a seat both ways, every day.
• The weather has been fantastic making the walk delightful. No rain so far!
• The new team are great. Nice bunch of people. I’m the second dev on the team, and we had a third join this week.
• Theres a lot of contractors. Something new to me.
• I’m working on the project that allows journalists/editors to apply various metadata to articles that then serves many purposes, including what sections of ft.com the article appears in.
• So far I’ve got my development environment set up, pair programmed my first defect fix, and also delivered my first solo fix and done a bit of code refactoring along the way.
• There’s some meaty new feature work planned for the next couple of months that should keep us busy.
• It’s completely and utterly different to the experience of IBM product development teams in many ways, which requires a blog post of it’s own.
• I’ve not been on a single conference call. Our customers are one floor down (in the newsroom, which I got to visit on the first day)
• We have a product owner and in general the scrum roles are much more clearly defined than on any project I’ve ever worked on.
• Have yet to eat lunch in the work canteen. I’ve always gone out for lunch, normally with others. There’s lots of choice around and prices are not as bad as I thought they would be.
• Free tea/coffee saves me a lot of money anyway.
• Today I didn’t even bring my laptop home.