Watt's Up Musings of an original geek

Over the past two years at work I’ve been involved with the same project. During that time my job has ranged from being a down and dirty coder to the project lead. All the development has been in the C language. The work has been split between a team in the US, and one in China. This split has been both a benefit and a source of frustration. Having a worldwide team of developers, whose 13-hour timezone difference allows almost constant development, has been good. However, this too has made it difficult to coordinate and synchronize the two teams. So about two months ago my management and I decided that we should transition the development from a split team to a single team located in China, and the US team doing other work. We felt this was best for the business. So I had to develop a transition plan and then execute it. In the next two weeks I will complete that task, and the project will no longer be mine. I have mixed feeling about what is happening since I have enjoyed the responsibility – preferring to be in control. However, I look forward to no more evening calls. To help make this easier on me I’ve started on a new project which I feel good about. This is fresh or clean-sheet development of a new specification. Although the interface is written in C I’ve chosen to use C++ internally. Returning to object-oriented programming has also boosted my spirits. I’ve been able to develop a set of abstract classes that represent the specification, and then implement them with set of concrete classes. So far I keep remembering Systemantics: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.” And that’s what I’ve done, and although it’s really not a “system” I still feel that what I’ve done is a good thing.