Reports Of My Blog's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated!
But you could be forgiven for thinking it was so. It’s been a long time between posts and there’s a good deal to report and a few things to celebrate.
On the professional front:
- In January I celebrated my first year of working for Cenqua/Atlassian (in August 2007 we were acquired by Atlassian). Working for Atlassian is much like working for Cenqua except rather than working with 7 really smart people on 3 cool products in a different time zone, I now work with around 150 really smart people on 7 extremely cool and increasingly well integrated products across 3 different time zones.
- This also means I’ve completed my first year of working from home. Home working has been a surprising adventure (and not always for good reasons - more on that in a future post) but I’ve survived and feel I’m now in my groove (well, one of them, anyway). Atlassian has also ramped up its European presence so I now have developers in my geographic region to work with.
- In May of last year attended my first Java One. I worked along side of the other Cenquans in the JavaOne trade hall demoing our products, talking with customers and networking with other nerds.
- Clover and Fisheye both won first prize Jolt awards! For those not in the know, Jolts are kind of like the Oscars of our industry. As a long-time reader and fan of Dr Dobbs Journal there’s a deep sense of pride I feel from being part of a team producing something worthy of a Jolt.
On the personal front:
- Today we celebrate our 5th anniversary of living in London. It was initially tough going but ultimately worth it. Moving countries always is tough, I suspect, but doing so during the worst part of the tech crash was not something I’d relish again. London is a fantastic and vibrant city which constantly surprises me - despite the seductive charms of the (for me, very accessible) cities Sydney, SF and Singapore, there’s no place I’d rather be right now than Finsbury Park, London.
- Wei Kiat recently celebrated his first anniversary of working at the British Museum. In that time he survived his first blockbuster exhibition, The First Emperor (ending on Sunday). Having someone on the inside with a thorough understanding of the events and celebrations taking place there has meant for a very culturally rich 12 months.
- In December we celebrated our 6th anniversary together.
- And finally, I’d like to announce to you all that I’ve decided to have my gender reassigned. Of late, you may have noticed my enlarged manboobs and assumed I’d been hitting the Krispy Kremes a bit too hard. Well, now I can now announce that this evening*, after several months of hormone therapy I’ll be going under the knife and will come out a new woman. Please kindly refer to me as Brenda Studman in all future correspondence.
Cenqua: here I come 1
The rumours are true, come the new year I’ll be starting with Cenqua - the creators of Fisheye, Clover & Crucible. I’ll be working remotely for them from my little corner of north London or to put it another way, I’ll be their premier UK employee. ;) My task will be to design, develop and support new and existing software development tools you will actually use.
This move has been a long time in the making - I first interviewed with them (a beer in hand, if I recall) back in the middle of the dot-com crash when they were transitioning from a service company to a product company. Unfortunately, like many, they’d just laid off staff and weren’t in a position to take me on. More recently this year I did some work for them but found my 9-5 racket was proving too exhausting to deliver anything substantial or on-time. Now the timing seems right for me to come on board full time.
You gotta love a company that calls its head office the “Central Command” and describes my role as “Senior Software Engineer / Architect / Code Poet”.
Matt, Conor, Brendan and Pete - thanks for giving me the chance to work on some great products! I can’t wait!
