Working together - is it really that hard?

I got very frustrated today. Partially I suspect this is born out of the stupid hours I have been working for the last 6 months. I haven't had a single day off and I've had to work a lot of weekends too. That adds up and eventually I guess you reach breaking point. Today I did and I regret it.

Working in distributed teams is difficult. Especially if there is an element of distrust there. That's what we've got into here. One team is located in London, the other is offshore. We're in the first week of String test and we've already got an "it's a Build team issue" vs "no it's an Integration team issue" argument going. This is going to be a very difficult String test if this continues.

So what am I doing? I'm calling a meeting for tomorrow morning and I'm going to make it clear that this will not be acceptable, not from my team, nor from Build. There are no "Build issues", no "Integration issues", just String test issues and I expect both teams to work together to resolve them. It should not be this difficult to get two teams on the same project to work together to resolve something that makes both teams look bad.

What annoys me is that this is something that should not be an issue anymore. The people involved have all been on the project for over a year. Have we done such a poor job of offshoring our build team that they still feel outside of the project, or that once they throw the code over the fence that's it, job done? I hope not. I hope that this is a blip and that we'll get through this. Unfortunately I'm not overly optimistic.

Go-live marathon

So last weekend was the big go-live for my project. Thankfully it was pretty big success. Kind of. Although we managed the upgrade, with no major defects and all 10 countries live it was a bit of a struggle and I ended up working 27 hours straight!

It was quite weird actually - we started at 3pm on Saturday and were expecting to work until about 2am (the joys of a global system - it's all about minimising the downtime for the "important" countries). Unfortunately, things didn't go quite according to plan so we didn't really finish until 5/6ish. I was supposed to be back in on Sunday at 8 for the start of testing, so I figured, I'll just work straight through.

At first, I was pretty knackered, but by the late morning I was surprisingly awake. The afternoon I seemed to keep going without any ill effects, but by 5 I was flagging. I thought about trying to see it through to the last checkpoint call (7:45), but decided home was the right decision!

I started a film at 8 to try and not destroy my body clock and wake up at 4am, but I fell asleep anyway, woke at 11pm, back to sleep, then up at 8am to spend another 8hrs online. Fun eh?

Got some great comments though, so I'm hoping that it won't have done the old career prospects any harm! I'll try and post some thoughts on the go-live in general later this week.

What do I actually contribute?

Just had lunch with some friends in Greenwich (The Yacht - not one of the best places for food if you're interested). Two of them work for the same company as me. Sam is currently thinking about becoming a volunteer constable for the London Police. He says he is bored of the same middle-class people all day long and wants to see a bit more of London.

Yesterday I was speaking to a friend from uni, she's looking for jobs at the moment, specifically one for a charity. I'm sure she won't mind me quoting her: "I want to know I'm making a difference for people who don't have a voice for themselves".

At the same time, I'm currently in the process of applying for a scheme at work to allow me to take a year out and go to work for VSO. Ideally I want to get the chance to go back to Africa, but I'm pretty open to going anywhere.

So what's the thinking behind all of this? I genuinely believe that more and more people my age (late 20's) are thinking about what their job actually means. What do we contribute? Am I proud of what I do?

For me, it's a bit of a strange situation. I've lived in Ghana, I've done volunteer work before. I tried (unsuccessfully) to get into charity IT work when I came back and settled for a company that felt a bit more personable that some of the uber-consultancies.Obviously I have previous in this area so it's not unsurprising that I would ask these sort of questions, but I do find it interesting that others my age are asking the same questions.

If I was a charity, I would be falling over myself to make the most of this - instead of taking on stale, ageing workers who just want to get out of the rat-race, why not employ young, hungry graduates with a few years experience and lots of ideas. You get enthusiasm, energy and dedication, all for significantly less money than their more experienced counter-parts!

Either way, it's something that I think is becoming more important for graduates. Saving Bland Incorporated such and such a year on their IT infrastructure just isn't as fulfilling as knowing that the company you work for makes a real difference to people's lives and I for one look forward to being proud of the company I work for.

Let's try again

Ok, so recent events have made me think I need to restart this blog. I've had a few ups and downs in my personal life over the last year, but I'm confident that all the right decisions have been made and I'm now back where I should be (and I don't just mean London!).

I haven't decided whether I'm going to change the focus of this blog. Music and the IT industry are still massive parts of my life. Most of the blogs I read are on this subject, but there are enough other, much better informed than me, people already commenting on these subjects.

I guess this will therefore be a bit of an organic growth - just see what happens! There might well be some more personal posts on here than I originally intended, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Might even be good for me to get some thoughts down on paper!

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The Music Industry

Since a post by a certain Mr. Jobs last week, a lot has been written about the music industry and where it is going. Some of it I agree with (especially Fred over at AVC) but most of it is nonsense. Apple is not the good guy in this situation. There are NO good guys, except the musicians, and sometimes I have serious reservations about some of them.

Apple have taken advantage of (yet more) lack of foresight by the music labels to gain the monopoly in mp3 players and the mp3 sales industry. Steve Jobs has absolutely no interest in removing DRM from iTunes, and why should he? Everyone knows that Apple makes almost no money from iTMS, and a lot of money from iPod sales. None of this is new.

As has been said before, Apple would sell more songs from removing DRM, resulting in slightly increased profits, but would have to rely on customer loyalty to ensure that they kept selling iPods. Personally, I think that the people who buy iPods probably fall into one of two categories - iPod fanboys who would never think of buying anything else, and people who don't realise there are other options out there. The people who fall outside these groups are probably so small as to be insignificant. Therefore I don't actually think Apple would lose out too much in the short term by removing DRM.

The problem will come with mobile phones increasing capacity enough to store music to rival the iPod. Hence the iPhone. If Apple opens up FairPlay, the opposition will not be other mp3 players - people don't buy them. The opposition will be the mobile phones that people will already own. Instead of having to think about which mp3 player they buy, customers will begin to realise that their phone can already do it - iPods become a thing of the past.

I personally think that the European nations will force Jobs' hand. If the UK became involved that would happen even quicker. I don't think this will result in the crumbling of the Apple empire, but I do think Nokia, Motorola and the other handset manufacturers will be the major competitors in the coming year, not Microsoft's Zune or iRiver, Creative, etc.

PassPack - Relieve those password worries

Ok, so I just started using PassPack to keep track of my online passwords. Like most people I guess, I have a lot of online accounts, and I tend to (stupidly) use the same passwords for most accounts. Even then, I still often have to go through each password before I get the right one. It's even worse if the account is linked to an email address, as I still often use my old hotmail account to sign up for stuff I'm not 100% about, so I can go through 6 permutations before I get the right one for services I don't use often.

Now, most of my stuff isn't particularly confidential. I use internet banking, but I don't need help remembering the password for that, so I'm not too concerned using an online service for storing my emails. If someone really wants to hack my MySpace page, good luck to them! So when I read about PassPack, I thought I'd give it a try, and I have to say I'm pretty impressed with it.

You give absolutely zero personal info, just choose a username, a password and a packing key and you're away. Okay, I can hear people complaining that this is another three things to remember, but once you can remember these three things, that's all you'll ever have to remember again! Plus, because PassPack doesn't hold anything remotely, you can access your passwords from any computer, a major downside to most password managers. This does mean that you need to log into passpack everytime you want to use it, and it has a very quick timeout, which means that you need to put in your packing key each time you use it, but I have found this to be a minor inconvenience.

PassPack is still in beta (v.3!), but it already looks good enough to me. The site is clean, easy to use, and very intuitive. There is some nice use of Ajax, without being over the top, and the general feeling of the site is extremely professional. If you're looking for somewhere to keep track of all those accounts, I'd definitely recommend PassPack.