This week I’ve started working for DRW Trading Group. They have an extraordinary team, including a whole bunch of people I worked with or know through ThoughtWorks.

It means that I’m returning to a technical role - my job at NYSE Euronext was entirely managerial and after 18 months away from coding I’ve found I’ve really been missing actually writing software a great deal.

There’s a lot we do here I won’t be able to talk about but I also hope to be able to find certain things over time that are generic enough to be able to share.

I’ve been using a very light form of “Getting Things Done” (GTD) for a little over a year now. This has been for mail management and self organization both for work and personal aspects of my life.

For both of my work and life GTD systems I use an email inbox as my universal inbox (using separate mail systems for each.)

There have been a couple of nice corollaries from this setup. The first is that my iPhone’s mail application has become my note taking device for anything more than a couple of bullet points, where I would still use index cards. A good thing about this is that if I want to keep the note it’s already in electronic format.

Following on from this, my email accounts have effectively become my journaling system. You’d think for this I’d use a complicated folder or tag structure but so far this is not at all true. I put pretty much all mail (and by extension notes and journal entries) into one folder named ‘archive’ and then rely on search texhnologies later to find content. This is possible due to the effectiveness of Spotlight on the Mac (I use Entourage for work mail, which uses spotlight under the hood, and Mac mail for personal mail, switching recently from Gmail.)

The reason these things are possible are the ubiquity of mail these days. I’m sure blackberry users have felt this for a while, but being able to very easily read and write email, on or offline, for both my work and personal mail, has been worth my iphone’s cost alone. As an example I’m drafting this blog entry in a new mail on my iPhone on a plane, and I remembered to do it because I could read the reminder to do it in my local cache of my GTD ‘action’ folder. I know there are GTD-specific apps out there but for me mail is sufficient and always available, anywhere, and backed up locally and on servers I trust.

Short entry this one, but something cool I came across recently.

Denver airport has ad-supported wireless Internet, rather than hotspots that are charged for.

This is implemented by the hotspot’s web proxy putting all HTML content in a frame, with ads in a panel. Email and VPN traffic are unaffected, but I would think the providers think this is fine since a huge majority of Internet use on their hotspot is web.

Back in the dim and distant past (before about 18 months ago) when I used to write code, one of the things I scribed was a little .NET utility by the name of Tree Surgeon. After hanging up my programming gloves I handed this little guy over to Bil Simser.

I’m glad to report Bil has taken good care of the application, and has in fact released version 2. I wholly recommend any .NET coder who needs to setup a new .NET project to go take a look.

I like Netflix - I pay a fixed amount per month and can watch as many rented movies / TV shows as a I want (subject to having a fixed number at any one time, and transportation time lags.)

I like Apple TV - instant gratification whenever I decide I want to watch something.

What I really want though is the combination of these two things. On-demand access to any HD content for a fixed monthly subscription (even if there’s some kind of limitation to make sure I don’t try and watch 10 movies a day.) Mr Jobs - make this happen.

I have a mac at work and a mac at home now. How to keep these in sync? Simple - Spanning Sync using Google Calendar as the shared central point. It’s not free, but it ‘just works’ (ok, Leopard had some iSync bugs in the early versions, but everything seems ok again now.) I really like how I can edit a calendar entry on my work machine and know it will eventually get synced to my iPhone when I sync that at home.

I actually talked about doing this kind of thing almost 5 years ago to the day - looking at that list of requirements its nice that it pretty much all works now. 2 things that are missing - I’d like my iPhone to sync automatically with my home iMac over bluetooth, and also it’s still too much effort to sync different calendaring systems (e.g. personal with Google Calendar, work with Exchange) together.

I actually like Google Calendar a lot, it’s fun that it implements those sharing features I talked about 5 years ago. I also think it has a better user interface than the iCal app on the Mac - I tend to find I enter brief details in iCal and then fill in the details on Google Calendar.

Update

Yes, I know .Mac is supposed to do all this too, but it was horribly broken when I tried to use it 3 months ago or so, and it doesn’t have something nearly as useful as Google Calendar as the web accessable / sharable part of the solution.

I’ve been on my current team a year now, and things are coming along very nicely. We’ve got a great bunch of people, the agile / XP practice is moving along nicely (lots of pairing, big whiteboard walls, TDD, automated acceptance testing, etc.), and we moved the desktop development environment to fully-specced MacBook Pros with 30″ external screens. Oh, and the pool table is still here so we’ve been honing our skills on that too.

The business has also got more exciting since the update I gave year ago. The NYSE merged with Euronext, and the team here is working closely with teams in Europe and Asia, as well as obviously working with our external customers too. We’ve also purchased Wombat - these guys have some great technology and I’m looking forward to our engineering groups working closely together.

We’re growing, and growing quickly! As such we’re looking for some more great developers to join the team. The most number of open positions are for our Senior Java Engineer position - this is a server-side java role. If you’ve got at least 4 or 5 years development experience and have very strong Java fundamentals skills (including concurrency / multi-threading) this would be most interesting to you.

Furthermore we’re looking for a small team to take ownership of the UI parts of our application. This is going to consist mostly of a re-write and adding new features, and the technologies would be largely up to you (assuming that they can run on a JVM on the server-side.)

The specifics of these are 2 roles are available below:

• Senior Java Engineer
• Senior Front-end Engineer

We’re also looking for product managers / business analysts, ideally with agile experience.

If you’re interested in finding out any more about these roles please email me - I look forward to hearing from you!

I don’t often have entries that are just quotes, but I liked this from Kent Beck on the importance of code maintainability:

Your organization is going to spend a lot more on somebody - you or somebody else - reading what you’re writing right now than they are ever going to spend on you writing it.

You’re going to read that code yourself 10 to 100 times for every time you write it, so it’s worth taking the trouble to make it readable. You’re going to modify it five times after you write it the first time, so it makes sense to make it easy to change.

I’ve really enjoyed using Facebook for the last year or so. Of all the social networking apps out there I  think it’s been one that has actually added to my overall happiness.

That said, with any new social medium, we still need to figure out what the ‘rules’ are to what we as individuals are happy with. A good case in point for me has been what to do with Facebook and colleagues at work.

Facebook has work ‘networks’ which are interesting ways of seeing what your co-workers are up to if you’re friendly with them in an extra-curricular way, but this situation can start getting complicated if your work relationship gets strained in any way. For instance, I recently saw a Facebook status update of a ‘facebook friend’ who I work with that made an already tricky situation more frustrating for me.

As such, I’m introducing a new policy for myself to limit my Facebook / work overlap somewhat - I’m not going to have any ‘facebook friends’ that are within my reporting hierarchy (i.e. if they report to me to any level, or if I report to them from any depth). For now, I’m happy to be linked to people outside of that, but even that is questionable for the long term.

Has anyone else thought about this at all?

The high definition disc war is pretty much a done deal now - Blu-ray is the victor. I knew it was happening, but when I got an email from Netflix today telling me I wouldn’t be getting HD-DVDs from them for much longer it confirmed my suspicions.

I did pick the wrong team - I bought an HD-DVD add-on for my XBox 360 only a few months ago. In fact the speed at which the tide has shifted is the one thing that has surprised me.

One good thing is I didn’t waste too much money - most of the HD-DVDs I’ve watched have been rented from Netflix (Heroes Season 1, Letters from Iwo Jima, etc.), so I’ll just buy a Playstation 3 in a couple of months and switch to rented Blu-ray discs instead.

That said, I don’t think Blu-ray will even last - Apple’s new HD movie rental is the sign of things to come, and I predict before too long on-demand, internet streamed, HD content will dwarf any Blu-ray sales or rentals. So my PS3 will likely be the last physical medium video entertainment device I buy.