My ex-employer as of only 6 weeks ago have been bought by Sungard - I didn’t see that one coming while I was there!

Like Marc, I predict there’ll be a bit of employee turnover from this. Although I can see how the acquisition favors Finetix and Sungard as organizations, I’m sure there are some Finetix’ers who will be disappointed by their firm losing its boutique status. If any of you are interested in a job, let me know!

Here’s a little gotcha for anyone using Ubuntu 7.04 (it might have been in 6.10 too, I’m not sure) and some amount of shell scripting.

If you refer to /bin/sh anywhere, Ubuntu out of the box points to a shell called dash and not (as would normally be the case) bash. Dash doesn’t have all the features bash has though (the flip side is that it’s a lot faster, apparently), so in some cases (including a few I just ran into) your scripts may cease to work.

The solution? Change your scripts to explicitly use /bin/bash or use the sledgehammer approach and relink /bin/sh to /bin/bash.

And yes, despite going point-haired, I haven’t escaped from the land of build monkey.

Today I got my 200th connection on LinkedIn. It’s not something I’ve deliberately gone about achieving, but now I have a ‘network’ that size I’m wondering if there’s something useful I can do with it? Maybe get a Stewie Griffin-esque mind control device and work on my plans of world domination?

We’re still trying to figure out a venue for eXtreme Tuesday. This week we’ll be at D.B.A. at 41 1st Ave between 2nd and 3rd streets. If nothing else their beer selection is very impressive.

I’ve mentioned this briefly in a couple of posts now, but I have a new job. Finetix was a great introduction to a financial software career in New York City, but my new role at NYSE TransactTools (or TT as I’ll refer to them from now on) was just too good to pass up.

So who is this new bunch I’ve got involved with? Until about 4 months ago, TT were a fairly young independent software company producing messaging software for financial institutions. Historically, most of their customers use this software for talking to each other in a protocol called FIX. The most typical scenario for this is when buy-side firms (investment funds, that kind of thing) want to send trading requests to sell-side firms (the investment broker/dealers like Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns. ) That’s by no means the only scenario, but it gives you an idea of the kind of the environment I’m talking about.

4 months ago TransactTools were acquired by the New York Stock Exchange. This is part of NYSE’s growth into new business areas. The interesting thing for TT is that they have big financial backing now, a whole new business stream to draw from, and yet are able to carry on working in the dynamic environment they were used to as a startup.

This alone was pretty compelling to me: the opportunity to work for a product firm and apply 5 years of experience in consulting to a longer-term game, to stay in finance, and yet work in an environment I far prefer to that of a typical Wall Street bank. However there was more.

Firstly, a member of the senior management team here is a guy called Murray White who I’ve worked with before and massively respect. He’s a bit of a handful sometimes, but one of the brightest and most honest guys I’ve met in my career. In short, he’s a great mentor. The next thing is that I’ve been given the opportunity to lead the development team here at TT. It’s not just a matter of taking on existing management responsibilities - I’m also being encouraged to bring in my own ideas and help shape this team into one that will be able to rise to the new business challenges. Of course, a lot of these ideas will be XP / Scrum practices, as appropriate.

There are of course a lot of challenges in taking on this new role. One of the biggies is that this is the first time I’ve worked at a software product firm for 5 years, and the way such organizations work with regard to release management is quite different to that of an IT organization with only 1 or a few customers. I’m sure I’ll be blogging more on this in the future. Also, leading a team as a permanent employee is somewhat different to that as just a consultant, so I have things to learn there too.

All in all, I’m very excited by this move. It is a huge opportunity for me, and a chance to approach software delivery from a different angle to that I would take as a consultant. I certainly plan to continue blogging, but the tone and content will probably change somewhat. Expect more rants and questions than usual!

I’ll end mentioning another big task I have to start with - that of hiring some great individuals - but I’ll be talking more about that another time!

Through a combination of switching to the Mac, moving to a new company that’s almost entirely a Java shop (more on that soon!), and becoming significantly ‘post-technical’, I’ve decided to bow out of my .NET open source projects, and I doubt I’ll be doing any .NET coding for a while.

I’ve been one of the project leads for CruiseControl.NET for nearly 4 years. Doing so has been a great experience and opportunity, and I’d like to thank all of the people who have contributed to CCNet in this time. CCNet still holds its own in a CI-tool landscape increasingly populated by commercial offerings, and the reason it can do so is largely down to its community. Owen Rogers, the rock of CCNet since its inception, will be holding the reigns by himself for now.

I’m also handing over Tree Surgeon, my own pet project for helping people start .NET projects off on the right standing. Bil Simser has graciously agreed to take it over, and has some great ideas so I’m sure this is a good step forward for the project. Bil has moved Tree Surgeon to Codeplex, so you should look there for all future activity.

This is ‘au revoir’ though, and not goodbye. I think C# is one of the most interesting software languages in the world today with all the new things that are happening to it, and who knows where I may be and what I may be doing in a few years time.

Furthermore, this is not the end of this blog or my being part of the agile software community. Indeed, I hope that this change will allow me to spend more time on some different areas. Ah heck, who am I kidding, once a build monkey, always a build monkey!

It’s already most of the way round the blogosphere by now, but I just wanted to join in the voices of condemnation against the people who have abused Kathy Sierra.

I use the word ‘abuse’ quite purposefully. It is, in my mind, criminal to threaten someone in such a way, and should not be toleratated.

I was disheartened, but unfortunately not surprised, to hear of Desi McAdam’s retelling of what one of her (male) associates said of the matter, basically ‘yeah, it’s going to happen, she’s just got to suck it up. If it was a man no-one would care.’. Did the suffragettes just ’suck it up’ when they believed it was unjust for them not to have the right to vote?

Apart from anything else, it completely misses the value of the individual, and without outstanding individuals like Kathy Sierra as part of our careers, and lives at large, we would suffer. It’s time we appreciate them, no matter their gender, and defend their human rights whether online or not.

eXtreme Tuesday will be at Vol de Nuit on March 20th. Geekery + Westmalle trappist ale - now that’s what I call a satisfying Tuesday evening!

One of the most important aspects to an effective continuous integration setup is quick and obvious feedback. People have come up with lots of different red/green ‘traffic light’ monitors, from CruiseControl.NET’s CCTray to Lava Lamps. However, one team has taken the metaphor a bit further - an actual traffic light. Click here and scroll to item 12 for more detail.

New York’s eXtreme Tuesday kicked off with a bang 2 weeks ago - we had a turn-out of 30 or so people and it appeared everyone enjoyed themselves!

The next XTC-NYC is next Tuesday (the 6th Feb) and will take place at Silver Swan at 41 East 20th Street (just north of Union Square). This place has some great beer on tap so I’m looking forward to trying some of it out over good conversation!

More detail on the XTC-NYC blog here.