Lecando

I started blogging back in 2002. At that time I was working at Lecando, where I was lucky enough to be doing Java development and experimenting with XP together with some ridiculously bright people like Jimmy, Johan, Jon, Håkan and Visar.

Back then, Java was where it was happening. All the new things happened in Javaland, and we did our best to try out the new things; TDD with JUnit, CI with CruiseControl.

I spent a lot of time then reading blogs. Most of the blogs I was interested in were hosted at FreeRoller, a platform run by Anthony Eden, today perhaps more famous for DNSimple.

I’ve spent five good years at Lecando. When I started out, we had ~25 employees. After a year we cut down to 14. After another cut half a year later, we held on to a pretty steady 10 until this spring showed to be terrible if you where in the business of selling addons to IBM Workplace.

Lecando will be employing 3.5 people this fall, none of them being me. I have been thinking about getting a new job for about a year now, so I am really looking forward to the fall and my new employment. More on that later.

Alef Arendsen ponders on whether to switch from Ant to a Ruby build tool. At Lecando we just this week finished migrating away from a Ruby based build system we called Raven. Our former employee HÃ¥kan speaks in his blog entry from way back then about the enthusiasm we shared. Of course, Håkan speaks of our migration from Maven, the build tool from hell of which one should not speak.

So we’ve now gone full circle - Ant - Maven - Raven - Ant. So what happened and why?

Chiara wants to work where Jon works, which is where I work too.

I wanna work where that boy works.

Just so you know, we’re an XP shop :-).

What time did Mr.Tirsen arrive?

Our morning meetings are at ten. I believe he was in by then.

As for the rest, sticking to architectural guidelines etc … too bad. “Do the simplest thing that can possibly work” and “You Ain’t Gonna Need It” are our mottos. Works wonders with architecture too, but it requires them “best and brightest” to come down from their ivory towers and start contributing to the code. I know a few people who feel that coding is below their skill level and dignity, so they won’t. Whatever, they will be the first to go when the revolution comes :-).

By the way I realized that my name is not mentioned here, and Jon keeps on calling me “boss”. This is corrected now.