All eyes are on you. The pressure builds. You are praying you won’t make the same mistake than last time, when you failed and lost the game because of that.

You set the ball, stand up and walk backwards, watching the ball and the goalie. During that backwards walk all you can think is where to hit the ball, fingers crossed that is where it will go.
Trying hard not to look where you are kicking the ball to, the goalie might know.

The whistle blows, you run towards the ball, hit it… And wait the longest 3 or 4 seconds in the whole match.

The minute the ball hoes past the reach of the goalie, into the net, and your shoulders relax - awesome!

How hard can it be? That is what I told myself when I jumped into helping to organise the Team Hug this year. To explain what the team hug is, think about it as a two day conference where everyone within the company comes together in one location. In most cases, people would typically be in their best behaviour. Why? for the simple reason that these are people you see everyday - your co-workers. Except this ThoughtWorks and nothing is a typical case. This is a consultancy firm, so we might not see each other for the next six months, or until the next team hug. So people are not in their best manners, they are just being themselves (which in some cases can be rather controversial).

During this two days, there is a lot happening. There are conferences which are a mix of personal passions, geek talk, tips and advice on how to make your work easier, experiences using this or that coding language. In between talks and days there is drinks, food and more drinks. In a nutshell, the team hug is just an intensive weekend of learning, drinking, eating and catching up with friends across the Australian offices. So here I was reading the email about joining the organising committee, and thinking, how hard can it be? And as I am, I jumped right in at the opportunity of seeing how things work, how organising a weekend away for ~170 people is like; an opportunity to learn.

Soon I started to realise that people are always people. And as in everything, there is always a variety of personalities and needs. I see it all the time at client sites where stakeholders come to a dev, or a ba, or me: why can’t you just get this tiny functionality in? Why can’t you just fix this bug? How hard can it be? It is just a small change, can you please slide it in? It is what it is, most of the time people can just ever see what their immediate impact is, what is in it for themselves. It takes time, work and experience to show the other impacts this “small fix” has, like braking everything else in the application. Or having this done, means that other thing cannot be done. 

As the team hug is just about people, it works exactly the same way: I am a vegetarian so please no meats, I suggest have no meats, it doesn’t matter that the other 90% of the people have to have meat in their meals. I will talk for 2 hours because I am passionate about this topic, I do not care if all of my audience is bored to death after the first 15 minutes. I need my talk to be moved to the morning; I need my talk moved to the afternoon; I need a projector; I need a microphone. And the list goes on and on. 

So after helping in this huge task that is organising a team hug I learnt that we think our clients are bad, but when we are the clients, how bad are we? Are we just being selfish? What type of client am I being? Am I being the nicest stakeholder who understands priorities, risk and balancing technical debt and functionality? Or am I the single minded stakeholder that only cares about my part of the story? Do I even realise I am a client? It all comes down to awareness, self awareness. Am I aware of what my part in this process is? Am I making sure I know who and how I am impacting? Because we are always the client of someone else’s work, so what type of client do I want to be…

As I write this I can not stop thinking how if someone who has never been in the depths of IT would have no idea what I am talking about. But I was one of those until mid last year.

And I guess that is what is most interesting to me. Even a few days ago braking the build was something that I might not have considered all that possible. At least not in my “first” project.

Admittedly the changes Rohini and I have checked in are not all that big. For me though, it is the beginning of a journey to being every day more useful and productive. Throwing myself out there to a world of unfamiliarity to become more and more independent at what I do. Being able to do the small fixes that are not enough work for devs but important enough that the business raises them.

As with everything is failing to learn. Increase that capability that is the difference between good and great.

Note to myself: they are too sweet, never have one again!

First time around I was meant to land at 8 am. I had an interview scheduled at 10. Plenty of time in between, to get to the office, have a coffee. Man, was I wrong! So I got to the airport when the sun had just started to rise, to find out my plane was delayed 40 minutes. Still, plenty of time. At the gate, time went by and an announcement was made, my plane was delayed 30 minutes more due to bad weather. I still had time to be on time for my first ever interview at TW.

Waited, got into my seat and hear the announcement: “The flight has been delayed for 40 minutes, sorry for the inconvenience”. Oh well, what can I do. I will be in late. Anyway, got to Melbourne, and I had a driver waiting (how fancy is that! I have always had to catch my own taxis!). Got into the car and the driver was not getting in. We were waiting for some people that were in my same flight that were going to the office. After what seemed like forever, they got to the cab. It is 10 am and I am meant to already be at the office. Nothing I can do.

I can clearly remember that day. I had strictly said to myself I was to enjoy that day. And did I like it! Although it was full of interviews back to back, it was great fun and I there I got to meet people that in some ways have marked my journey and in other ways my life. I even got to meet, the legend (I did not know at that time he was such a legend!)… wait for it, Andy Tam! Anyway, the day ended at 4 pm. Again, a driver was waiting. And off I went.

Three months into the company (I guess I did not make a fool of myself that first time around!) I am back. Never had I ever been out in Melbourne. After landing, check in at the hotel and off we went walking with Fabio around the streets of Melbourne. The more I walked its streets, the more I fell in love with this city. And again, met few others, including, the legend (yes, that is right!).

Where we went, I do not know. We changed bars, went for a kebab, walked the streets. Only in this city I felt possible to walk an alley where I would have sworn was taken out of a movie and this was the crime scene.

Now that I am part of the Sydney Social Club (SSC) at work, I have realised that organising is not such an easy job if you do it frequently enough. In a company where all its employees are scattered around client’s offices, how do you form your own identity as a corporation? The whole idea behind SSC is to make this gap between the employees that much closer, so that people feel part of ‘the office’. 

In order for individuals to feel part of a tribe, of a group, they have to be identified with such group. In a mix of people from all over the world, with different religions, cultures, backgrounds, marital status, gender, age, what do you do to make everyone feel part of it all? Moreover, how do you get them interested and involved?

So bouncing ideas between the members, we finally agreed on a mix of activities. Now the challenge relies in to invite people and get them to participate. The “simpler” solution is, as it would seem logical, to send out an email to everyone. I have been wondering though, if this is really effective. Not only to invite people to the activities we organise (did I mention they are free?!?!?!), but to organise any activity that requires more than 5 or 7 individuals. Because, if at least 50% of the people is like me, chances are they do not read half the emails, and the other half get lost in the filters and the cyberspace of their mailbox. 

Yesterday we had another incident, about something not related to the SSC. Same principle. People had not signed up for a collective thing. So are emails really effective? Personally, I do not think so. People like to be invited, we like personalisation. Let us be honest, people like the thrill. We want to be part of that party everyone is talking about because the 8 year old kid complaint and even wrote a note about it. We want to know that by being there, things will be different.

We watch that movie our friend recommended, read that book our colleague just finished. Reviews are important, specially if they come from someone close to us, because chances are they are very similar to us (particularly our friends and family). 

So how do we spread the message across to a large community? Whether it be a meeting, a recruitment day, a conference, a social club. If you ask me, you talk about it, to everyone that cares to listen. You make sure “rumor has it”.

Did you know in javascript inputing a number with a preceding 0 converts the number into octal (base 8)? 

There I was in my first project coding for democracy! Or I should say testing. Or both. To give some context, I participated in the coding of a donation input box but my role is a tester. I hate to admit that maybe this “bug” should have maybe been caught while I was pairing writing code. I guess the question now is… am I a really bad coder or a really good tester? I honestly hope the latter for it is what I am currently trying to achieve.

Anyway, back to the story, there I was testing the donation box. Experimenting with the usual: letters, symbols, spaces, negatives, commas. I was getting increasingly impressed with the quality of the code. Try a 0250… redirecting to PayPal… oh wait what?!?! Did I input 373? Try again, type in 0200 this time… PayPay invoice… I am sure I did not put in 310. Have I discovered my first bug, like, ever? I have discovered my first bug, like, ever! 

Did this mean that maybe I could actually pursue a career in software testing? I hope it did, as I am walking down that path. In any case, never had I ever tested a software and found a bug!