Today marks the end of two very interesting, busy and fun weeks. The new colleagues are all great and smart people. Working with the new and unknown in a still startup like atmosphere is actually more fun than I have expected it to be.

My first tasks

We (still feels kind of weird to say we and not they) develop our software following the Scrum model and have sprints with the length of two weeks. On my first day I had the pleasure to join the planning meeting and due to being the new one was assigned to easier tasks to get to know our product and have time to read a lot of docs, too. My tasks for the first sprint:

• database backup and restore for one of our customers is not working. Fix it. The problem, the dump is 20 GB and I had to download it first. It took 24hrs until the file was downloaded. Next problem, try opening that file in an editor to figure out what is wrong. Long story short it was due to an uploaded file that was saved in the database. The solution was to decrease the file’s size to under 100MB and the restoring worked without a problem.
• make a so far hard coded JSP displaying statistics configurable for certain users. That onenwas easier and faster to solve. And it was a fun task, as I got to know our system.
• read the manual, presentations, and other documentation from/on/about the company

Task three was the one I probably spent most time on. Which is OK as I wanted to get an idea of what the company is, how it operates, how it is represented to the outside world and so on.

New tools

During the first week I installed the tools I needed for the new job. Among them where a ton of new tools that I have not used before but started to like pretty fast:

• PostgreSQL – the database. Mainly used Oracle and SQLite before. But PostgreSQL is a fun to use database.
• Glassfish – the application server we use. Have not used it before, sometimes it feels kinda slow on deploying new code, but well. It works.
• Netbeans – The development environment used. Though there is some small effort going into making Eclipse a usable IDE, too. I have actually switched the keyboard shortcuts map to the Eclipse one as I am more familiar with them.
• Truecrypt – Encryption software for customer specific data.
• Keepass – to store passwords so I don’t have to remember them all.
• Exodus – A Jabber chat client.

Those tools help me a lot during my day-to-day work and I highly recommend all of them – at least try them out.

Improvements

There is still a lot of room for improvement at the company. Some processes have not yet formed and everyone at the company can still have a lot of impact on how the company and the product will evolve. We will start working on technical and infrastructural improvements in the next sprint. It is also nice to see that people are open for changes and improvements. Convincing is not that hard – the hard part is actually finding the ressources to implement the improvements. Those ressources are made available by the boss(es) starting next sprint, so we will have some fun and interesting tasks coming up.

Feedback

I am happy to get feedback on this blog post – feel free to leave a comment, contact me on twitter or send me an email. What tools are you using? Any recommendations or comments on the tools I am using?