Work NC

Today I packed up a lot of my belongings at work, including my beloved bookshelf. Next week will be my last week at my current employer.

We went out for drinks last night with my team, that was fun. Today we had lunch together — North Carolina BBQ, of course. It’s sad saying goodbye; it’s a great group of people.

Yesterday afternoon we had our summer social at work.

Michael, a colleague, volunteered his pool and garden and we organized a BBQ/pool party for our office. It was a beautiful afternoon and it was a lot of fun.

I’ve started a training course at work. It’s called Bullet Proof Manager, and there’s a session once a month. Today was the first one, and the topics were ‘negotiating’ and ‘listening’. It was quite interesting, and I especially liked the role-play, a good exercise.

The training was in SciWorks, a technology museum for children, in Winston-Salem. There was a divers group of participants, from many different industries.

My calendar for tomorrow.Well, this week No Meeting Friday did not exactly work out: I have nine scheduled meetings tomorrow.

Lot of things to catch up with but it’s fun to be back at work.

Today Petra and I went for lunch in an Thai/Chinese/Indonesian cafe in Cary. It was nice to catch up with her.

We examined the nasi goreng and satay with a critical Dutch eye. The verdict: it was delicious, but the nasi goreng especially was different than in the Netherlands.

Later I prepared my cubicle at work for the holiday season.

Today is a study day, and I’m reading up on HTML5. We do a lot of user interface development for my product, and I’ve always had a strong preference for industry standards above proprietary products such as Flex and SilverLight.

HTML5 has some cool features but the transition to the full spec in the industry will take a while. However, many aspects are already supported by major browsers. Incidentally Secha, a Javascript library we chose for my product at work two years ago, is making a major push into HTML 5/CSS3 and today released a new product to support their vision.

I’m reading “HTML5 for Web Designers” by Jeremy Keith, a great introduction. I’m at the car dealership today to get some major maintenance done. They’re fixing the breaks, battery, the engine cooling system… a big job.

A delegation of a European customer visited our headquarters in New Jersey this morning and I spent three hours with them (through a conference call). This is a major financial institution, and they were one of the first large customers for my product a few years ago. It’s great to see them using the product, and talk with them about their needs. The product is deployed in several of their data centers now and they’re using it extensively.

By chance I visited a second huge customer in the afternoon. They are located in the Research Triangle which makes it easy to stop by and discuss things. That was a productive visit as well.

It’s great to make software that solves real needs.

I’m in San Jose, California for a business trip; we arrived a few hours ago. I just finished checking my e-mail and worked through the updates from our bug tracking system.

It’s 5.00 pm here, 8.00 pm at the East Coast, and we’re going for a run. First meeting at 8.00 am tomorrow.

Last week I brought some dark Dutch chocolate to my work.

I served it on a Delft blue plate and it was well received.

Today is a beautiful day; the sun is shining and it well in the 80’s. I’m working, but I’m doing something I really enjoy: small bug fixes.

I don’t have much time during the week for coding and my job doesn’t really require any coding. But, I enjoy it and where possible I’ll sneak in some small fixes or tiny features. I’ve learned over the years to only take on non-critical features and bugs since I can’t commit much of my time. I find that doing some coding every now and then makes me a better engineering manager and it keeps me rooted in software development.

So today I’m doing small stuff: input validation, improving our ‘diagnostics’ page, updating the on-line help etc. I’ll wrap up in an hour or so and when it is a little bit cooler I’ll go for a run.