KpaxAndAgility

I recently realised that I spend most of my working life programming in Java, but that I'm not a "Java Programmer".

Having spoken to a few "Enterprise Java Programmers" I can empaphise with Kevin Spacey's character in the flim K-PAX In the film, people don't believe that he's an alien travelling from another part of the galaxy, or that he can travel faster than light, or that he's from an advanced civilisation. They just believe that he's another urban nutter.

When you talk to people that have a mid-nineties, traditional, enterprise sucker view of the world, it's surprising how much of an alien you can feel even if you do use some J2EE in your projects.

"What? You can deploy in under an hour and you do it every week? It takes us a week to do. What happens if you find something breaks?"

<eerily calm voice>On my planet, all the code is tested and subject to what we call "continuous integration". It rarely gets checked in if it's wrong. If it does go wrong deploying it doesn't take that long to roll back anyway.</eerily calm voice>

It's a lot of work trying not to freak them out. Sometimes I yield to the temptation. ;-)

-- DafyddRees