Note: this was originally posted on Praqma’s blog
The life of a consultant has drawn me back, but perhaps surprisingly, this time it’s not a return to my one-person firm. Rather than reinvigorating Bache Consulting, I’ve decided to join Praqma, the Continuous Delivery and DevOps Company. I was pretty happy at Pagero. I’ve successfully run my own business before. Some of my friends think I’m crazy to leave a good job with a great team working with exciting technologies. Others think I’m crazy to not want to be my own boss again.
So why Praqma?
Code that gets used
Writing code is really good fun. Writing code that people actually use is even more fun. That’s one of the reasons I like setting up Continuous Delivery pipelines for a development organization. Anything you change gets used almost straight away, and you get feedback from people around you all the time. It’s a fantastic feeling when you implement something that means the whole development team can move forward more quickly, confident in the quality of what they’re producing.
The kind of work I’m talking about is setting up build and delivery pipelines using a CI tool like Jenkins or Go.CD. It’s automating all the installation steps needed for a new machine in a staging environment. It’s moving all the code into a modern DVCS like Git, and setting up automated processes to help keep the master branch in a working state.
In my experience, this kind of work gives you the opportunity to raise the productivity of so many other people, it can have far more impact than if you stayed in your cube hacking on a product by yourself.
Amplify your effect
Another activity I really enjoy is facilitating and teaching. Preferably that kind of teaching that you do from the back of the room, where your job is to set up situations where learning is inevitable. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years facilitating Coding Dojo meetings, and more recently I’ve started doing more Mob Programming with teams. My aim is usually to get people to experience effective development practices like Test-Driven Development (TDD), and understand the difference it makes.
Again, the focus is on raising the productivity of other people, this time through coaching and training. Actually, I’m not directly raising anyone’s skill level. What I’m trying to do is to activate people’s innate motivation to want to get better at their job, and showing them a way to do that. It goes hand in hand with making the technical environment they’re working in conducive to good practice by having good automation infrastructure. TDD makes a lot more sense when you have a CI system to run the tests, and information radiators that show you when the build is broken.
Raise your game
So I’ve just joined Praqma, which is a consultancy focused on Continuous Delivery and DevOps. I now have a host of colleagues who are also really skilled with this kind of technical coaching role I just talked about, and know how much fun it can be. We’re really good with tools like Jenkins, Docker, Artifactory and Git, we set up Continuous Delivery pipelines, and we coach developers in how to use them. What we’re finding though, is that once we’ve got all that set up, the next step usually involves improving the automated testing in the pipeline. We need to be there coaching developers in TDD, and getting automated system tests set up.
That’s where I’m hoping my joining Praqma will help us all to raise our game. Starting with the consulting work Praqma already does, which of course lays the foundations with Continuous Delivery, we can start doing more coaching in test automation. I have long experience of that, teaching TDD in particular. I have much less experience of some of the other things that Praqma does though. What I’m hoping is that by working together with the other consultants at Praqma, and collectively sharing our toolboxes, we can all have more fun and achieve more for our clients. I don’t mind working alone at a client, I’ve done it before, but having colleagues is so much better. We’re going to have a blast!
Join us
Praqma is expanding throughout Scandinavia right now, with offices in places like Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm already. I’m starting the office in Göteborg. If the kind of technical coach role I’ve just described appeals to you, I’d be delighted to tell you more, do send a mail, emily.bache@praqma.com, or a tweet, I’m @emilybache.
We’re not only looking for senior people with lots of experience, by the way. If you have the right attitude and willingness to learn, that can take you a long way. We’re looking for people to join Praqma at all our offices, please send your resume and a covering letter to jobs@praqma.com. Of course I’d be particularly pleased if you wanted to join me in Göteborg.
