Skip to main content

Learning the holy ways of consulting

You might've noticed another fall in the number of posts here lately, because yet again it is time for summer vacation. I've now been vacating for a week, and it feels like I've been away for a month. So, in order to keep my fingers warm, I'm semi-planning the arrangment for 9 new Java-developers we're receiving in the beginning of August.

The reason I dug into this job of training the newly recruited is obivously that I want to turn these new peeps into miniature versions of myself. They're (mostly) fresh out of university, are all smart and pleasant people (I met them on a couple of previous occasions), and seem like good potential mini-me's ;)

Jokes aside, I have a strong opinion on how new guys and gals should receive the most basic knowledge and in what order this should happen. Personally I was quite abrubtly launched onto a customer's site, but luckily I had a couple of years of experience in the right direction, so I already had basic stuff like agile practices, IDEs and Subversion-tools in my finger tips.

Now before I go on about how my job is best taught, I have to ref this blog-post by Scott Adams. Basically, he asks his readers to describe their job in one sentence. If I had to describe my kind of consulting, it would be:

Figuring stuff out.

We figure out how stuff works. Tools, frameworks, techonolgies, products and code. Then we teach this stuff to the client. A guy I know in uni recently stated "I would like a job where I get to test a bunch of different frameworks and try lotsa different stuff in a bunch of different ways..". Well welcome to the company, buddy, because that's exactly what consulting is about (well, my kind of consulting anyway. You have another kind of consulting which involves pushing crappy software onto clients, but in a way that's a good thing for us because there are lots of clients willing to hire us to clean up afterwards when these other kind of nasty consultants have made a total mess of things).

Some more advice to any new consultant starting out.

You're young and silly. This means you can get away with being completely honest. Yell out when things are going wrong. Just do it, and keep doing it for as long as you can. If you're lucky, the skill will stick and make you an even more valued consultant than.. well, what you would've been.

I like to think that I am still sincere and honest, but I'm afraid that after a while in the profession, we earn a chunk of respect and rumour around in our company, client-range, blogosphere, etc. and we want to maintain this amount of.. honour, in a way. We don't want to be admit our mistakes, because that lowers our value as developers.

The previous statement is wrong! Being able to admit your mistakes increases your value as a developer! Remember two things though:
  • Admit the mistakes before anyone else finds them.
  • Never bring along a problem (inclduding the ones you have created) without suggesting a solution.
I belive honesty is the most important value of agile development. But enough of that now, onwards with my advice to new consultants.

Learn the strokes! I saw some slides from a Dr. Heinz Kabutz talk (Productive Coder) in TSS Barcelona, and there was one slide where he advised: Spend hours learning your IDE: The keyboard shortcuts, the refactoring, the auto-completion. This will speed you up! There are only two commands in Eclipse I can not do without the mouse, and I hate it because the mouse is slow! Know your tools well, it will speed up your development, and also spread across the team as you keep giving them small hints and tricks that make their day easier. And it will make you look good/helpful, which are are important traits of a good consultant.

Be curious! If you want to get good at figuring stuff out, get going. Try to figure out stuff. Download this and that open source project and build it for yourself. Try the tools out. Set up a server, create an application, just do it. Try it. I know it is hard, most software seems pretty crappy after the 10-minute test, but there is a reason the software exists, and its probably you who haven't gotten round to find the correct solution (yes, it might be poorly documented). Keep trying, get on the mailing list, ask the community how it works, but first, read the f****** manual. I hate reading manuals (mostly I prefer tutorials), but that's where the answer will be.

Spread the knowledge! Brag about the stuff you do. Share code and write about the stuff you are doing in the company wiki. Write a blog! People will notice and respond to your engagement and activity and give you feedback when they found the stuff you wrote helpful or inspring (if you do not receive feedback, you're either doing a poor job of profiling yourself or working for the wrong company). This is also an important aspect of consulting. Inspire the people you work with.

Now, enough inspiration for one post. I will get about two days with the new guys which will be Java-development only (agile concepts included). We'll do some micro-sprints a couple of hours a piece and run through as many of the basics as we can. This post was actually going to be more about the concrete content of the sprints, but I think its long enough already. Back to summer-vacation :)

Comments

  1. Hi Thomas!

    Hope you are enjoying your vacation in the south of Norway!

    I really like your thoughts on how to get inspired and motivated employees. Some of the problem of being curious is often that you have little time in your working hours to actually trying stuff out. I've ended up doing a lot of my trying outside working hours and without pay. And in the long run this has benefited not only me but people around me at work.

    I'm getting two new young and promising people to my project in august and I will make use of some of your tips. I'll find some programming tasks for them to work on after they have had time to learn the IDE. And i might as well run them in small sprints.

    Great post Thomas, keep up the good work! And get back to Oslo soon so we can chat on this over a beer!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched   GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

Considerations for JavaScript in Modern (2013) Java/Maven Projects

Disclaimer: I'm a Java developer, not a JavaScript developer. This is just what I've picked up the last years plus a little research the last days. It's just a snapshot of my current knowledge and opinions on the day of writing, apt to change over the next weeks/months. We've gone all modern in our web applications, doing MVC on the client side with AngularJS or Ember , building single-page webapps with REST backends. But how are we managing the growing amount of JavaScript in our application? Yeoman 's logo (not necessarily the conclusion of this blog post) You ain't in Kansas anymore So far we've just been doing half-random stuff. We download some version of a library and throw it into our src/main/webapp/js/lib , or we use it from a CDN , which may be down or unreachable when we want to use the application.. Some times the JS is minified, other times it's not. Some times we name the file with version number, other times without. Some

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config-zsh.git     -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --