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...

A new engineer that comes in gets a new MacPro with dual quad-core CPUs and 12GB of ram and a MacBook Pro. The down side of the whole deal is that you have to choose between two 23’’ or one 30’’ Apple Cinema display. (via LinkedIn Blog) Before entering the consulting industry I always worked for software shops, where I had my own desk, my own desktop computer, my 20” displays, and so on… And working with a laptop and non personalizable desk is sub-optimal. This also means that you will never...

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...

Today it was my last day of work for the company that hired me last year and brought me to Wellington: we tried to go on working together from overseas, but with 12 hours of timezone difference was too difficult for me to manage the team of developers and lead the development of the new applications. The "work from home" experience was great, but, in my 2 month experience with "that" kind of developers and with no overlapping working hours, is only good for development, not for managing people or projects, especially because you cannot make a phone call to...