I’ve been a developer on a new-to-me team at a new-to-me company for a week! I will call it GB.

Some thoughts:

  • I have pushed code! (Not pushing code in the first week is a big danger sign.)
  • Onboarding was pretty good.
  • The lead of the team that I have joined is temporarily out of town but joins standup and is usually available on chat.
  • I’ve been keeping a private GB-internal repo of my notes; much more disorganized than what I kept at BT. It works.
  • Working downtown right next to dentist, doctor, coffee, train is very useful.
  • I like HipChat noticibly less than I liked Slack
  • As far as I can tell there is no parallel to TW’s software-dev mailing list or BT’s #dev and #devnull slack rooms. This is weird to me and it worries me a little
  • I created a ruby@ email group (there was already a java@ email group)
  • created a HPMOR/lesswrong hipchat group, because if someone else looks for one I want them to find it. :)
  • GB supports conference attendance well
  • There are some very friendy & helpful people; even if I didn’t have friends at the company already, I would still feel welcomed
  • I already feel moderately comfortable in the codebase
  • I presented my current mildly-complicated bugfix at the friday code review and got good feedback
  • GB’s test style as I know it is very much “go read betterspecs”

Pondering:

I am not a huge fan of the git-flow workflow style; I am willing to participate in it and I suspect that I will become more familliar with its positive attributes over time.

Standup for my team is at 10:15. Some people participate from home (via Fuze, which is functional but not-great) and come in later. There are more of my teammates present in the building at 6pm than at noon, and the majority of my team is still in the office at 7:30pm. I am totally okay with this; it is different from how I have previously been working. GB does not have to coordinate with any teams in an earlier time zone, which is is nice.

GB doesn’t pair. I’ve had a few people tell me that they’re open to it, that they like it, ‘just not all the time’. I’ve worked in all-pair-always environments, and I’ve worked solo; I think that not pairing gives you a different set of growth opportunities as a developer on a project. Onboarding is a little slower but also more focussed on my own ‘oh hey what is that?’ and ‘how does the thing that this bug is about work?’ than on what my pair thinks are the basics on the app. So maybe it takes a little longer, but there is more freedom.

I have done work on three ‘cards’ (all three are bugs) so far. Two are done and waiting for feedback and/or ‘ship it’ commentary on their pull requests. (See above: GB uses git-flow workflow.) One of my bugs manifests as a bug for GB but the pull request is against a codebase which technically belongs to a different team (but also part of GB) and is semi-paused; also my unfamilliarity with coffeescript makes my progress a little slower. I also created and fixed a ‘chore’ task which I felt needed doing.

Like many SF tech companies, there is free food. The free lunch is indidually packaged, from a limited but diverse submenu of what the service called Eat24 offers. The snacks are also very tasty. The office is serious about recycling and putting your own dishes in the dishwasher.

I am one of two female developers on my team. I have met two other female developers in the building, and of course there are female people who are on other teams in other roles. I’ve been welcomed as “our new female developer!” three times that I remember, which I find unusual and mildly weird but not unpleasant. Apparently several GB people have gone to the Grace Hopper conference in the past and are planning to go again this year. I didn’t bother taking off my bright green nail polish before starting my first week of work.

Thoughts on communication outside work:

  • I generally don’t write the full names of where I am working, but it’s not a secret.
  • There are currently no comments enabled on this blog. If you want to talk to me about it, try twitter or do it through github issues. If you already know me on other social media, that works too. :)
  • I took an hour to talk to a former coworker (TW) who is pondering other opportunities; we discussed things like coding outside of work vs leaving work at work, how to prepare for the algorithms portions of interviews, death-by-a-thousand-cuts, and other company stuff.
  • I got coffee with another former coworker (TW) earlier this week just to catch up on life and stuff.
  • Yet another former coworker (TW) messaged me, prompted by interviewing someone who I had recommended.
  • I exchanged messages with another former coworker (TW) - idle chitchat about a project that we had both previously been on, and other projects which we were both aware of.
  • As far as I know, I have four twitter acquaintences from BT.