Rick, our precious and beloved COO, has insisted that I post to the company blog.
I’m not at all opposed to that, but have a hard time finding the line between my voice and that of the company. After all, being CTO, everything I do reflects on the shop in some way (sorry, dudes!)
Things like showing up on time, going to bed by 10pm, having a baby, being married… All of this baggage really drags the reputation of this place down. I’m sure we’ve lost business due to my lack of cirrhosis or the fact that I’ve never tried a cigarette.
Hi. I’m TobyJoe, and I’m boring.
This post will serve as both an introduction (again – HELLO!) and a follow-up to my serialized biography and self-crit.
Geographical Biographical
I’m from Georgia. I totally hate Georgia. That’s why I don’t currently live in Georgia.
But, as with all rules, there’s an exception. I really like Athens. I spent many years there and still have lots of friends and contacts in that area. Aside from the time I was involved in a ~20 person line cook vs fratboy brawl and got my face smashed in by a guy in a ballcap, or the time two crackheads broke into my apartment and held my roommates and I at gunpoint (until one roommate – the son of a WWF wrestler – snatched the gun away and chased them outside), my memories of Athens are AWESOME.
I really dig college towns. Clean air, relatively smart and cultured folks, big houses, cheap everything, and almost zero stress… Ah, sweet college towns.
My wife is from State College, PA (JoePa!) and I adore the place. It’s got everything: the Amish, a bagel store, and some mountains. There’s a Quaker school for
my son. There are even
mobile meth labs!
Conflict of Interest
My big personal conflict here at The Barbarian Group is between my small/college town lust and my trendy almost-passion for agile development.
I’ve become quite the advocate of certain agile development methodologies over the past two years. One thing agile prefers is colocation of teams in order to foster better communication. It makes sense. That magical moment of standing over someone’s shoulder, helping them solve a bug or tweak a design makes a lot of the shitty moments (late nights, framework design flaws, Web services) more tolerable.
Here at TBG, we work in a way that only offers partial colocation. We split all projects across all of our offices as a way to ensure whole-company influence. We don’t have an “A Team” and a “B Team” and so on. We have one massive, terribly awesome team of folks who are cross-functional despite their classical titles (which some of our more stodgy clients demand). Every project here is touched or thought about or spoken of by nearly every person at some point in its life cycle.
It works really, really well. We produce amazing work. Nobody reading this can compete with us. We’re retarded good.
The only downside is that, occasionally, implementation tasks can feel a bit isolated. Chandler out in LA can’t easily ask me to take a peek at something without going through a whole SVN branch-commit-checkout process. It kinda kills some of those magic moments.
It’s a minor gripe. It’s an aesthetic gripe, at core. I like these folks, and like to collaborate in the flesh. For one, that sounds really filthy (YAY!). Also, online, I come off as a real dick. In person, I’m super cuddly and lovable. Sexy, even.
So, where’s my conflict, exactly?
The gist is this: I frequently push towards stronger colocation, despite clear proof that our current methods work very well. At the same time, I long to buy a farmhouse with a T1 and work remotely year-round.
I’m thinking I should shut up about colocation and just move to the country. At least then my boring lifestyle of child-rearing, book writing, team building, job selling, coding, cooking and going to bed early will be a novelty.
Maybe I’ll buy a huge Victorian and make it into a Barbarian Bed and Breakfast. I can fly project teams out and put them up in four-poster beds and cook them Berkshire bacon and eggs and make them work their asses off and choke on the clean air.
on December 08, 2008 at 03:18 PM
