Turning a new corner
This summer has been the most significant in my life. While I don’t often write about personal matters in this blog, I will make an exception.
On July 12th my son Leon was born. Healthy, happy and obviously, from the perspective a father, perfect.
Going through this fundamental life change has made me decide to re-evaluate a lot of things. Most importantly, I wanted to evaluate my career.
In the last few years, I have spread my focus thin. I have enjoyed working with developers in Norway, Sweden, Sri Lanka and elsewhere tremendously. I have enjoyed working with many different customers in many sectors. I’ve enjoyed new knowledge in C#, Android, as well as continuing to deepen my knowledge in JavaScript and Java. I’m grateful to the whole team at Exilesoft for giving me the opportunities to learn so much.
As my personal life gets more focused, I also want my professional life to be more focused.
As of August, I start a position as Director of Software Development at BrandMaster; a small, but solid Norwegian product company which develops a Marketing Resource Management (MRM) portal in Java and JavaScript.
For years, I have fluttered around to various companies as a consultant, opining and hopefully helped them develop their products. Now I want to be part of building a product where I can feel ownership and long-term commitment.
BrandMaster is a small company that has the energetic feel of a startup, but the established product and customer base of a mature product. The field of MRM is moving from one of a specialized tool to something that more and more companies find themselves investing in, as witnessed by the entry of Microsoft, SAP, IBM and more large players into the field.
I find that the experiences that I have gathered in BBS, Steria and Exilesoft provide a good basis for contributing to BrandMaster. This means that I will focus on a more narrow set of problems in the future: Moving a product towards greater more frequent releases, more effective use of test automation and agile planning and tracking. It means that I will be able to focus more narrowly on my favorite technologies of Java and JavaScript. And it means that I will be able to work more closely together with a great team of developers and creative people.
This does mean that I will not stick my neck out quite as much when it comes to large projects and organizations, C# and mobile development (although there will be some mobility in the future) in this blog.
Stay tuned: Queued up on my plate are instead super-simple project tracking, demo-driven development, effective unit tests, continuous delivery, 12factor Java 8 and product development.
I’m looking forward to a set of challenging problems at the same time as I get the peace of mind to enjoy the company of my son and his lovely, beautiful and sparkling mother.