Last week was the first week of working at Sophos in downtown Vancouver. I joined this company because they we are a fantastic organization making fantastic products in a growing industry.

The first week was like going back to school – I’m writing C and Perl on Linux and I forgot everything I knew about the Linux / UNIX system and library APIs a long time ago. Fortunately these are great people to work with, and they knew I’d have this learning curve for a couple of weeks.

We are doing pair-programming for most of the work. It’s a full Extreme Programming shop, and that has been really fun so far. I’d tried pair-programming in the past but the problem was never having quite the right set-up: we have special workstations with one computer, two monitors, two keyboards and two mice. Instead of crouching around a single monitor and trading the keyboard back and forth, both people sit comfortably and can immediately switch back and forth with no effort. Its really been a positive experience.

Another great feature of Extreme Programming: having the customer proxy (the guy whose opinion about features counts the most) sitting in the same work area all day long. Got a question about how the feature should work? Grab the customer guy (his name is Marc on my team) and get the answer immediately.

It was a little bit of a risk to join a company so different than my last job but I really think this is exactly the kind of place I like to work. Many times this last week I observed and participated in activites that reminded me of my best memories from development projects are Creo. I’m sure there will be days that I get frustrated too, but I doubt that will happen very often.

Today actually started my second week, and it was a great day. Learned a lot more about how our project is assembled and how the various components interact. I can hardly wait to go back tomorrow!