I want no monuments

This Tuesday I began a new adventure: I’m technical director in the business company my sister has founded. The company relies on a software done years ago by another company, now partnering with us.

These very first days were not very happy.
First of all, I didn’t write a single line of code. Gosh, terrible!
Second, the whole app is a mix of VB6 and VB.NET, glued together in (yet another) data driven app where the (fluscking) db has MUCH more power that it deserves. It costs a lot to extend (because of the Microsoft licenses… naah really, don’t tell me!! I can’t believe that! … ) and is generally slow.
Third, the current team members are a bit aged and they probably fear a loss of control by using technologies they don’t know.

Quite hard to find a breach where I can place a Glassfish/JBoss/Tomcat instance. If you have advice about it, I’ll really appreciate.

In the meanwhile, my friends at Reply are struggling to get ready for the new demo. Even if I’m officially out until April, I’ll join them next week.

Last, this evening I’ve met Reply local boss, in order to find a way for the JUG Torino to use their meeting room. And they are happy to have the pleasure to host us: so they will, probably next month.

So, why fresh air? Well

• I’ll try to hire some new and skilled developers as soon as possible (read: as soon as I have the money to do that)
• We are working on expading the “JUG way” on software
• While my friends at Reply are struggling, they know all they have to do is keep on doing TDD as we did since we began working on the project (read: refactoring/fixing)

So definitely some new things are going to happen in the next weeks/months and my “Italian Silicon Valley” dream, day by day, is getting more real.
Just a dream anyway. I’m not in a hurry: I’m having fun.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Business, Software Development, Job. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.