Management

A couple of months ago I was handed the reigns of the development team at RMSS. Since then I have interviewed and hired a new guy and have got two major projects on the go and have started a little bit of training and knowledge sharing after our scrum meetings a couple of times a week. What is interesting is that all is going pretty much as I expected except that I can't seem to leave work at work. I never have been able to really, if I had a problem to fix, a bit of architecture that I was nutting out in my mind I would go over and over it until I had a solution to all the intricacies of the problem and done a mental cost/benefit analysis to see if it made sense. For example last year I had to come up with a scheduler that would return appointments or jobs and their status for a given period of time. I thought about the problem and implemented it over a couple of weeks. There was one particular issue that bugged me for a few days, I didn't get the solution until I had left work and was riding my motorbike home when the solution came to me.  Another solution came while I was eating breakfast.

I still do that but now I have to worry about my team, is everyone happy, how they are all going, what I can do to make us more productive, enjoy our work better etc. etc. It is early days in this management role, I think things are going well, this week each member of the team is going to present an element of SOLID design after our scrum meeting. When I said we were going to do this I got a mixed response but I guess we will wait and see how it all works out and if the team put much effort into presenting to their peers. I hope so. I would really like to see us all looking for innovative ways to solve problems, to have a toolbox full of patterns and principles we can draw on everyday to solve programming problems.

It is an exciting time, So far I like this gig. The hands on manager thing seems to be fitting me pretty well.