One year on from ThoughtWorks University

by David Reed, Developer

Arriving back in the UK after TWU I was put straight on a project doing 4 X 10h day weeks in the North of England. Although this meant being away from home during the week the team had a fairly large number of ThoughtWorkers and at least one client person in the same situation so it was very social with us hanging out in the bars of Knutsford most nights of the week. The project was a fantastic experience to follow on from TWU; we ran a fairly pure Agile methodology and the client was very pleased with our end product. The team was also great not only because they were a good group of people but there were many experienced people I could learn new things from each and every day.

After rolling off at the end of that project, I was offered the chance to travel to the US or Australia to work on projects that we were having trouble staffing with enough people. I chose Australia as it provided an excellent way to get home to Melbourne and catch up with all my friends there as well as escape the English winter for an Aussie summer.

My first 3 months were on a project which was facing challenges. The client was trying to optimise output and had doubled the team size with contractors from another consultancy. Needless to say this was a challenging situation to face after my previous project. It worked out well though, I paired for 3 months, reinforcing unit testing and other technical practices across the whole team - working with client and other consultancy developers.

After Christmas I joined a project for an internal application for a huge Australian company. The work has been interesting and challenging and we are again using a fairly pure Agile approach. We have some challenges, but I'm beginning to see those as the 'interesting' bits as there are usually creative ways through.

The staff in Melbourne have been great to hang out with and with so many out-of-towners in Australia at the moment I have found myself becoming a tourist in my own country again, showing them around.

All in all I've had a very enjoyable time and have learnt a lot. All said I am also looking forward to heading back to the UK from my Australia posting towards the end of June and catching up with everyone there again too.

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