The Last Man Standing

You may recall that my company has decided to shut down our Cambridge office and scale back its development operation significantly. Since that announcement I've been busily looking for other gainful employment, and have been pleasantly surprised that the job market is not entirely stagnant. I've had a number interesting leads that I'm still following up.

However, in a dramatic turnaround I have now secured a safe position in my existing organisation, which is a huge weight off my mind. (That doesn't necessarily mean I'll stop looking for other work, but it means I'm secure in the meantime). I am The Last Man Standing.

I was a little disappointed that we didn't have an Apprentice-style face-off for the position, with the CEO saying you're fired to team members in turn. In the end the selection process was little more than a job proposal, some phone calls to the states, and a little negotiation. No pistols at dawn.

This new role is going to be somewhat taxing. Solely responsible for the future of the codebase we've developed, reporting to the US, without the safety net of on-site QA or hardware support, working on my own (in a location yet to be determined). I'm genuinely unsure of how well I'll be able to work on my own; I've never done that before. It's going to be a bumpy ride...

And, I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to structure my development process. Let's be honest, it's hard to do XP in a team of one. Pair programming will be somewhat tricky, and code reviews hard to elicit. I'm going to need to build in something to replace the accountability in our existing development process. All comments and suggestions welcomed...

It's been a great three years working with a team of talented and motivated people, and a real shame to get to the end of the era at this early stage. There was a lot more potential in the team that we hadn't yet exploited.