Starting at Eden
Not many people can honestly say that they are actually doing their dream job. Many people have dreams and aspirations, and somewhere along the line they end up in a completely different destination. Life just has that way of sidetracking you, without you even noticing. That being said, on September 21st 2008, I walked into my dream job. Everything would be plain sailing from here on, the hard work had already be done getting here in the first place, right? Wrong.
From the first hour I realised that that these guys (and girl!) were good… really good. Not just that, they were talking in a completely different language to that which I was accustomed. Agile Development? Behaviour Driven Design? RSpec? Outside-in? Fixing broken windows… isn’t this a computer company? To say I was confused and a little scared at this point, would be an understatement. I still had a very big mountain to climb, in fact, my journey had only just started.
However over the last few months that I have been here, I have really started to grasp a lot of these concepts. Not perfect, or master them (that takes time and practice) but the value of them and how applicable they are to modern software design has blown me away. The concept of Agile Development and BDD isn’t completely strange and abstract, in fact, it’s quite simple:
- Write a story to explain the feature you are adding. (This can be done by the developer or customer)
- Run the story (it involves Cucumbers, i’ll explain some other time)
- The story fails (no code yet)
- Write a spec for the code that you will finally implement (This is the second layer of testing)
- Write code
The first 4 steps can be repeated a few times before any real code is actually written. When you do come to write code though, you know it works. How? The specs tell you so. It’s magic. Compare this to how I was taught software development in University:
- Write a design document (This explains the entire system and its individual components)
- Create UML diagrams and User Specifications for every Class in the system and how they interact
- Write code
Fewer steps, it must be quicker. What I didn’t mention was that the first two steps can take months alone. Often by the time that you actually come to write some code, a feature of the applications design has now changed, this means that has to be re-written and the diagrams all updated. Further delays. This monolithic approach is largely inefficient and frustrating!
So Agile Development works out better for the customer and better for us programmers (we actually get to do what we love doing!). Coupling that with strict testing at every step ensures fewer bugs and greater flexibility. You can approach each new feature/problem with confidence knowing that if any change you make breaks another part of the system, it will be caught by the tests failing. This is why the staff at Eden actually love doing what they do. They get to write awesome software, and have fun doing so. Compare this with the Games industry which is full of programmers who are overworked and burnt out. They were in what they thought was their dream job, but really wasn’t. I still have a mountain to climb to reach my new goals, but I’m having a lot of fun doing so!
Eden is a great company, with extremely talented staff. We have lots of really interesting projects spanning many different industries. I think this mountain will be quite fun to climb :)