Work stuff

The last two weeks have been busy for me. On the work front Nigel, our PM, returned back to the UK to start a pre-booked three week holiday last Friday, which left just Leakey (the tech architect) and myself as the on site consultants. Before Nigel returned to the UK I have to say I was beginning to get a little riled with Leakey, who has been a strong advocate of reoganising the software development to become Agile driven. As part of this he started to dictate to me what I should be doing, not something guaranteed to foster good working relations.

Things started to get more fraught as the week progressed with John, the owner, pressing Leakey for his input on matters. Perhaps a database design? Maybe some coding standards for the mostly green developers? Things came to a head on the Friday afternoon when Leakey was finally meant to be presenting his suggestions for improvements to John. And the suggestion was to implement an Agile process which he launched into with gusto. Now, some of you are techie types who will know about this sort of thing and some not. If you're not please do bear with me for a moment and I'll try and explain a little. Agile is a process for developing software that covers a multitude of sins albeit with an emphasis on keeping things "lean": fine tuning requirements as you go along, self tasking on a daily and longer basis. It's terribly dynamic and just a tad American (whilst "Extreme Programming" has some things to commend it, the name is not one of them, whatever next, extreme ironing?). Leakey started off with slides covering the Agile Manifesto (yes, it's called the Agile Manifesto...). Anyway, for those of you unaware of this Manifesto ("like your manifesto put it to the test-o"*) it reads:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

He then expounded on the virtues of not producing any processes and not needing any more documentation. And you know, there is a lot to be said for this approach if you're overburdened with processes and have a highly experienced team ready to tackle a new project with vim and vigour. Rather less to be said for it if you don't have any real processes, tools or comprehensive documentation to start with and a team overwhelming made up of recent graduates. A long full and frank discussion between John and Leakey ensued during which I spent a lot of time looking at my watch to see just how late I was going to be for my supposed early out to miss the traffic and get to a National Park whilst it was still daylight. Oh, and I practised my ESP death ray powers as well but alas, still not got the hang of it. Maybe I should start on goats. At the end of the discussion John took me into his office and vented on me... he was somewhat upset that after spending thousands of Euros all he'd got was "one powerpoint slide and a load of bullshit". Quite.

I eventually hit the road a couple of hours late and had to phone a few work people on the way. More on the big game weekend in a later post. Leakey was given until Tuesday to come up with something practical. Like a DB design. He didn't. He did come back with another twelve powerpoint slides extolling Agile though. I am now the only consultant on site.


* Answers as to where this comes from on a comment please, no cheating and Googling!

First week on the job

Been settling into the job over the past few days although as I was in Egypt only a little over a month ago and given how much it's been on the TV of late I keep getting a little confused where I am. I know, I know, not much change there.

So, where to begin? Well, as the previous post indicated the apartments are very nice, regular home away from home. Got picked up at 9AM on the first day and taken to the office, marvelling all the time that I'M IN AFRICA! Whoa!!! Been twenty years since I was last in Kenya and now here I am working. I know I've been to Africa since then, most recently last December but that was North Africa. I ended up, you may recall, reaching Aswan, the furthest outpost of Mediterranean civilisation for millennia and considered pushing on. For me though, Africa is Sub-Saharan Africa with all it's riotous, rainy and sun baked melee.

Mind you, the areas I'm living and working in are pretty up market compared to where I was last time, although the red brick soil remains the same. Talking of my previous visit, part of a year spent backpacking around Africa, I mentioned to the boss of the company I'm working at that the last time I was in Nairobi I'd stayed on Latema Road and had been drinking in The Modern Green Day and Night Bar. He cracked up laughing at this as The Modern Green has one hell of a reputation, almost literally. Africa does dodgy bars like nowhere else I've been.

Work is pretty full on and is basically a consultant role. I'm one of a three man team, a technical architect by the name of Leakey who's a local chap returned here after years working at Deustche Bank, a Project Manager (PM) by the name of Nigel who's ex Vertu and me as Quality Assurance (QA) manager. In theory I should just be setting up the QA department and working on overall quality improvement but the role is broadening out from that. It's unsurprising that Nigel and I both come from a mobile phone background considering that Nokia fronted the money for us. However, mobile phones are very much a minor part of the work which is actually good from my perspective as it allows me to break out of what I've been doing of late. The areas we're mostly working with are supply chain solutions, so I'm drawing in part on my old days as a technical author at Pennine.

Challenging, fun and bloody hard work so far. We covered so much ground in the first week I feel like I've been here a month already. There was a lot of information to be taken on board in this period and with that done actually implementing things begins with my QA team doing a scoping project on Monday.

For those of you with a test background let me outline what's going on... until now the company has had no real QA process. Testing consisted of the tester getting a partial release of software, running ad hoc tests and recording defects in a "log" which consists of an eight column Excel sheet. These were then bounced back to dev who fixed the bugs then return the logs back for validation and for more bugs to be appended. No test cases, no repeatability, no real plan. And given that the software is buggy and a major re-factoring program under way it's not going to be possible to write any test cases. I'm really having to pull something creative out of the ether for this one, and I'm hoping the plan I've come up with will work. I almost had a Gordon Ramsey moment in one meeting as a developer presented screen mock-ups it has to be said.

On more mundane matters , although the office is less than three km from the apartment and we're being picked up at 7:45 it's taking over half an hour to get in. I walked it quicker this morning when I went to a "Masai market" held next to the office. They take the rush hour seriously in these here parts! Also nice to work in a place with a tea lady, who comes round dropping off flasks of hot water and hot milk along with tea bags, coffee and hot chocolate. It's got a kind of 1970s feel to it.

John, the boss, took Nigel and I round Nairobi National park yesterday. Got to see zebra, baboons, various gazelles, a glimpse of a rhino, giraffes and various other game suspects. I felt that John was a little disappointed we didn't find any lions or get a decent look at a rhino. We dropped in on a swanky bar on the way back and he casually mentioned that his brother owned Hill Tops and he'd see if he could organise a weekend there for us at some point. Hill Tops is apparently where Queen Elizabeth learned of the death of her father and hence her accession to the throne. From this I assume it's quite a swanky place.

Zebra crossing

In other news I finally finished my antibiotics off on Thursday and although my gum is still sensitive I think the infection has gone. I do hope so. On the up side I can now drink again. On the down side after yesterdays beers and a couple of glasses of wine I've had a stinking hangover for much of today. Ah well, might as well enjoy, it's back to the fray tomorrow.

Teething troubles with the Kenyan job

Part of my preparations for Kenya involved going to the dentist to make sure my teeth were OK. I knew I had a cavity that needed seeing to so got in touch a couple of weeks beforehand. Of course, the dentist couldn't actually see me for a week and then had to make another appointment to do the actual work as it transpired that the cavity had touched on the nerve pulp in the tooth which meant I needed root canal work. This was scheduled for the Wednesday before I flew but, alas, illness forced it to the Thursday morning. By Thursday evening the increasing pain in my gum made it pretty clear that I had a problem.

Come 8AM on Friday I was on the phone to the dentist and got an emergency appointment. By now the pain was raging. The dentist confirmed, with a second opinion from her colleague, that yes I had an infection and prescribed two different antibiotics including one which I could not drink alcohol with at all. When I picked up the prescription the chemist reiterated this point "No drinking with this one". OK, OK, I get the point! And pain management? Cocodamol and ibuprofen was all they could do. That pretty much wiped out my Friday which I'd pencilled in for last minute shopping and lunch with a friend. The shopping was haphazard and I wasn't exactly a sparkling conversationalist over lunch preferring to look miserable instead.
The one bright spot lay in me being so off my head on painkillers I didn't feel the pain of buying a fancy new camera, a Sony Nex5. Oooh, it's shiny and nice.

Some sleep came on Friday night courtesy of a sleeping tablet but didn't prove to be that restful or long. A constant regime of painkillers through the day saw me eventually on the train to London woozy from the amount of codeine I was on. The original plan had been for a convivial glass of wine or two, chat and food with another friend but that was torpedoed by the tooth and turned into food and me once again being sullen and little fun.

Then, on to Heathrow Terminal Three. Ah, Heathrow, what can I say? It's crap, that's what I can say. particularly if you're off your head on pain and painkillers. Unfortunately by this point my head was swimming but either the pain was getting worse or they were no longer cutting it as I was hurting really quite badly. Sitting there, waiting for my flight I was beginning to think the antibiotics weren't working. If you've ever had a root canal infection you may appreciate where I was. If you haven't, good for you. To be honest I was seriously mulling over cancelling the flight but in the end staggered on, head spinning.

The flight itself was fine and with the aid of another sleeping tablet I managed to get four hours sleep, and then, before I knew it (pain killers, remember?) we were touching down in Kenya! W00t!

John, the head of the outfit I'm working with, came to collect me from the airport. Nice chap, shame I couldn't hold a decent conversation with him which has been something of a recurring theme of late. We stopped for coffee on the way to the apartment at a place on the edge of a game park (the only game park in a capital city in the world I was told) but alas, no game to be seen. The apartment itself is nice enough, regular home from home as you can see from the pics below.

If it's good enough for the FBI it's good enough for me...

The only shame is the wifi doesn't work, so I've been getting internet withdrawal symptoms, trying to use CNN on the TV as a substitute. Didn't really help though. Even so I managed to make it through the day and went to bed at 10pm local time in order to help get my sleep cycle sorted.