CodeClimber

If you follow me on twitter you might already have understood something: last week I gave my two months notice to my employer, Avanade Italy. I've been working with them since the end of 2007, and during the almost 2 years and half I learned a lot. Especially I added to my skills-set some competencies I never had the chance to practice working for a web agency and for a product company: the so called consulting skills. I also had the great opportunity to coach on the job some junior developer that just come out from university (or with little...

On November 12nd, 2007 I started working in Avanade Italy. And today, November 12nd, 2009, it’s exactly two years I’m working here. One year ago I already wrote about my first year, and this second year didn’t change opinion about the company: it’s a great place to work, with both tech and soft skills training provided, with the CTO caring about technology (something that should happen everywhere but unfortunately never happened in my previous jobs) and with an overall family environment despite being a 400 persons company. Unfortunately, due to both the current economic situation and to...

Exactly one year ago I started working at Avanade: wow, time passed fast, way faster then the 10 months I worked for Calcium (7 of which in Wellington). And now that I think, it’s the my second longest job. Another funny coincidence is that the weekend before starting my job I was showing Milano to David Silverlight, and this weekend I showed Milano  (and other cool places around, including a flooded Lake Maggiore) to another of two guys I met in NZ through the “enlarged” .NET community, Nic Wise and his wife Leonie. But back to the main...

Yesterday it was the day of the second UGIALT.NET conference in Milano: almost 40 people attending, 8 different speakers/moderators and a lot of interaction (and a free lunch courtesy of the sponsor of the event, Avanade). Many people were new to the ALT.NET thing, and to the "good design principles" as well, so we decided to try and spread the good news. With that intent the event started, after the welcome speech, with 6 lightning talks (thanks to the Welly .NET UG for the idea) on the basic concepts we would have used in the afternoon for the hands...

After the "small success" of the first UGIALT.net mini conference in February, UGIALT.net is organizing another conference in June. The second UGIALT.net conference will take place on Saturday June 14th, and will take place at the offices of Avanade Italy, in the center of Milano. As for the other conference there will not be a fixed agenda, but the event will be a day-long discussion on the topics decided by the participants, probably developing a small app to focus on the various stages of the development. If you are Italian and want to know...

Since many of you asked me about it, I thought I should write a short recap on my first week of work at Avanade. I'd like to be short, so I'll comment with just 2 words: impressed and overloaded. Having worked always in small and unstructured companies I was impressed on how many well established procedures there are, especially in the project management and project development area. After installing software on my laptop I went through a 3 days long virtual course on the project management and development: it my first time in a virtual class room, and I really liked it. Another...

After a long period in New Zealand and a few months working from home, today I started working in Italy again. I spent the last 3 "sabbatical" weeks doing almost nothing related to programming or IT in general: I went climbing, I took David Silverlight around Milano and took him climbing as well, and also started going on bicycle again after I had a bad injury ten years ago. Too early to give an opinion (today I just filled forms and installed my laptop), but it seems to be a nice place to work: I even found out that a...

As I already anticipated last week, I left Calcium, and after looking for some possible jobs I choose to join Avanade, which, if you don't already know, is a global IT consulting company specialized in solutions using Microsoft enterprise technology, jointly owned by Accenture and Microsoft. In the .NET world Avanade is famous because the first release of the Enterprise Library was based on the Avanade Connected Architecture for .NET (ACA.NET). I'm pretty excited to start this new professional adventure, since I never worked for a big company and also Avanade seems to be using all the latest Microsoft products and technologies...