Nathan Lee

Well, I finished my first (half) week at a new job this shortened week lead up to Easter. I picked a good start week to ease back into work after about 6 months of travelling and touring.   It’s good to be working in the city CBD of Sydney, as of all the places in the world I’ve visited: Sydney I rate most overall liveable. There’s something about the aesthetics of Sydney which make the place quite conducive to a happy existence.

In terms of work itself I’ve been doing the usual reading half a wiki to find out what things are and how things are done. Fighting the urge to track down and torture the people responsible for making J2EE (JEE sorry) and messaging kinda painful to get up and running: IBM.

RANT WARNING!!

I mean I used to whinge about IBM’s painful install process back 5 years ago when I taught Sun’s J2EE architecture and developer courses and STILL nothing has changed?? Get on with it guys. You do so much other stuff so well, but boy do you make people suffer to get things installed!

END RANT!!

What else is new in enterprise techie stuff in Sydney:

• Still no one using ruby (or one of these other fanboy languages) on anything important or real (thank fuck for that) and using either Java or .net based stuff.
• Lots of places with hiring freezes, the usual stupidity to get around such things (hiring contractors instead of employees).
• A bit of gloom about the economy but no where near say the UK (the part of the world that invented gloom).
• Ajax stuff making a bit more of a show (google’s framework in particular)

I’m working with a couple of colleagues of mine from the old days at CustomWare Asia Pacific. Things seem to be in place fairly well: automated build stuff, unit testing, morning status stand-up (although what sadistic fucker puts these at 9am eh?).

Anyhow, it’s kinda good to be back working although thankfully the daylight saving hour helped me be a bit more awake. Guess I’m an upstanding member of the community again (e.g. I’m paying tax and helping clog up the CBD again?) and I don’t feel quite so worried about dropping a chunk of cash on a new toy.