Beginnings

For the last 8 months I have been working away from home for one of the household name insurance companies as a delivery manager, with a remit as trouble shooter; and boy have they had some c*** to sort out. Gotten a bit tired of that, too long away from home makes me even less sociable than usual and sorting out the same old shite again and again gets tedious, very tedious. But it’s coming to an end and from this week I am on a 4 day week there, mainly so that I can start work on a far more interesting start-up endeavour with some colleagues.

This new work promises to be far more interesting, and has the merit of not being in the financial services area (hallelujah, and possibly good timing too), so I am looking forward to it and plan to “blog” progress on it here. Currently I am working flat out to finish an ITT for the required hardware that will be needed and researching technologies such as Jboss Drools, as well as sorting out what project management and office software we will need and use (open source as far as possible, subject to costs - and isn’t that interesting ? the annual support costs for technologies such as Red Hat et al are now no longer, de facto, cheaper than Windows).

The development teams we have engaged are Croatian, and that’s proving interesting as well, for a variety of reasons. Again currently my focus is on sorting out the working methods we will need to adopt for near-shoring. I’ve been playing around with Fogcreek’s Fogbugz product for the bug reporting, always liked Spolsky ethos and approach, and it looks like a good product, so I think we will trial it on the hosted basis.