About this blog

In this blog i will talk about what kind of things i'm doing at my work.

About me:

I work as a .Net software engineer at a big ICT company in the netherlands. I've been a software engineer for about 6 years now but i've started programming years before that. Basically i started out writing a website using perl with a textfile database. I became so into programming that i switched studies from doing a electrical engineering study first to doinh an ICT study. Basically you can say that i've made my work out of my hobby.

When i first began to work i started out with a parttime job next to my new study where i was programming in asp and MSSQL 7.0. After a while the company i worked for at the time made the transition to .Net using VB.Net. Also a few java projects came up every once in a while. One of the more interesting projects back then was a javaproject using struts as an application framework. That's also when i became very much interested in design patterns and ways to make the practice of software engineering better.

Later ( about 2 years ago ) i switched companies to be able to work for a much bigger company doing bigger projects and having much more experienced people i could learn from. One of the things i discovered pretty quicky was that the amount of skills i allready had learned were pretty good compared to the skills i saw people had at the projects i started working for.

When i began working at the new company i started to get very interested in doing projects in an agile manner, at first by setting up a continues integration server and making some unit tests and right now by taking a look at the complete software engineering process and adopting as much of the agile processes as i can convince my teammembers to do.

Probably a lot of what I will talk about on this blog will be about me trying to make projects work in an agile fashion. I unfortunately haven't worked in projects with a complete agile process but i keep trying to convince people around me to adapt agile practices with mixed succes.
Since a month ago I joined a project involving a big sytem involving mortgages with a big team consisting of testers, designers, developers and implementers. They work somewhat iterative but there are alot of things which can be done much more agile.

In the coming posts i will start explaining the steps i'm taking to slowly transition to agile. Hopefully i will succeed in this effort.

IvoG