Chris Alexander
26th July, 2008
Well, here I am at the end of my first week working with the crew at Huddle - and what a week it’s been!
From going to living about 20 minutes from schools and universities, the long commute was a little strange to begin with. First train at 6.38 and not arriving at the office until about 8.50 at the earliest, and then leaving again about 5.20 and not getting home until gone 8.00 was unusual to say the least, but it was more than worth it.
All of the guys at Huddle are really great people to work with - fun, hard-working, motivated and enthusiastic about everything they do. I’ve never gone into a workplace and felt so comfortable, and had so much help with what I’m trying to do. Even though what I was doing must have seemed simple and trivial, the dev team were always more than happy to help and everyone else was always happy to help with the non-technical stuff. I couldn’t ask for a better welcome :-)
As for what I was actually doing, I’m pleased with how much I managed to get done, but I would really have liked to get a bit more sorted out. I managed to finally get the Google Chart API to generate a burndown graph for me from the Mingle statistics, so that was really good for me to finally get done! I’m also pleased I managed to configure the box so that it could display information on the big tv, and be easily connected to remotely. The one thing I would have liked to have done was get user statistics displayed on the screen, but connecting to a Microsoft SQL Server from an Ubuntu PHP installation seemed a step too far. I’ve tried another tactic, so hopefully that will work out, we will see on Monday morning.
All in all I’ve had an amazing week, and I can’t wait to get back in on Monday and do some more stuff! My to-do list is quite long; I think preliminarily I will be doing some testing on the Huddle file uploads and then working through some recently published documentation relating to testing automation.