Week One Down

I made it through my first week as a Kiwi employee!  To restate, I am working as a developer at Vista Entertainment Solutions, who produces software used by cinemas around the world.  Vista is truly a global player.  I am in a team of developers, a business analyst, testers, and a scrum master.  And my team is itself pretty global – 2 from India, 2 from the UK, 2 from South Africa, one from Zimbabwe, one from the US (me), and one, yes one, from New Zealand.  This group has been so completely welcoming of me, and has been more than willing to help me get adjusted to the group and the products I will be supporting.

The week started with the typical first day stuff – the brief orientation, followed by the site tour, then being taken around my team lead to meet a lot of people, then finally settling in to start getting oriented by reading a whole slew of development documentation that guides the coding standards and processes used at Vista.  I’ve also been part of 3 training sessions (more to come).  Vista seems really good about using training sessions to orient new employees.  I’ve also been part of a code share, where one of my teammates reviewed her work with me and two other developers.  I even contributed a couple of suggestions – yay me!  Thursday was all sorts of meetings – sprint review, where the development work that was completed in that two week sprint was demoed; sprint retrospective, where my team gets together and discusses what was good and bad during the sprint, with suggestions for improvements; and the sprint planning session, where we planned out the work for the next two weeks.  And I have 2 or 3 feature changes to work on.  Today (Friday) I made my first code change, to correct a fairly simple bug.  I say fairly simple, but my approach to correcting bugs is reproducing the bug, figuring out how it is supposed to work, finding other examples in the code that work as needed, and then implementing similar changes.  For this bug, that whole process probably took between 3 and 4 hours.  I expect that as I become more familiar with the code base, those times will come down.

On Wednesday, Murray Holdaway, the CEO of the company, stopped by my workstation to welcome me.  When I interviewed at Vista in August, Murray was one of the people I met with.  He is one of the nicest people you could ever meet.  We chatted for 5 to 10 minutes, and it never felt like it was something he thought he was supposed to do; it was something he wanted to do.

Finally, today (Friday) my team had a group lunch at a great Indian restaurant.  It was really nice to be able to connect with some of my teammates (those sitting close to me) on a more personal level.  I learned that Liz is a vegetarian, Alice is from Zimbabwe, Dan is from the UK and currently lives in the Swanson neighborhood of Auckland, Conrad is kind of engaged and has a border collie who does in fact herd him and his partner (Kiwis refer to their significant others as “partner” regardless of gender).  Then, at the end of the day, I got to join folks for Friday end of day drinks in the large breakroom.  One of the refrigerators is stocked with beer, wine, cider, and non-alcoholic beverages.  Cricket was playing on the TV too.  I was there with my teammates Ashley and Dan, and Murray (see above) joined us.  Murray took great delight in teaching me some of the finer points of cricket – and I now finally understand it a bit more.  I also learned that Murray’s 2 sons love American hockey!  One of them loves LA, the other loves the Bruins.

So – one week down.  I have to say it was a pretty darn good week.  And I have Monday off for Auckland Anniversary Day (take that my Columbus friends who had Jan. 19^th off).