Lace Up Yer Boots!

Lace up yer hiking boots and grab yer alpenstock, 'cuz that's a mighty big mountain we be climbin'!

I thought my last role as a consultant for the Rational tool suite had a steep learning curve. I had felt like I was hauling myself up a long and rocky slope with a few trusted companions to keep me company and administer first aid if I fell and scraped my knee.

There were a few nice views that helped make it worthwhile, but on the whole the outlook was barren and the path was beset with robbers lying in wait to ambush me as I passed by.

Working for ThoughtWorks is a completely different proposition. The mountain is higher, longer and steeper. But there are a multitude of different paths to explore, each with its own character and rewards along the way. And there are hundreds of ThoughtWorkers travelling with me, offering me guidance and support, and lending me a helping hand from above.

I've changed languages from Java to Ruby. Instead of test-driven development with JUnit I'm doing behaviour-driven development with Cucumber. I've switched from Spring to Rails, and from predominantly back-end development to predominantly front-end.  I'm learning frameworks with amusing names like Jasmine, Gherkin and Capybara.

Then there's the supporting technologies. I've switched from Windows to Mac (yay!) and from a centralised repository (SVN) to a distributed one (Mercurial). I'm using Mingle instead of Trac for tracking issues and Go instead of Hudson for automated deployments.

All this while trying to remember dozens of new faces and names, living in a  new city, and memorising a repertoire of songs for my new chorus (did I mention I'm a singer?).

XConf and the YOW developer's conference were like chair lifts, giving me a boost up new terrain with relatively little effort. My ThoughtWorks colleagues answer my dumb questions with endless patience and good will. But often it's my own hard legwork that carries me forward.

It's daunting at times, sometimes downright scary, but also terribly exciting!