January was my last month at WorkDigital and, more generally, in London. My year-long journey with them has been a hell of a ride. Their domain of work is complex and particularly interesting. I owe them the chance of working on some really puzzling problems from which I genuinely learnt a lot.
What I’m really proud of
During the last year I worked on (many) different things and mostly touched every part of the core company platform. I spent time on a wide range of activites spanning from rewriting internal core components, refactoring old bits of forgotten code, played/benchmarked candidate tools and frameworks, cracked the good old “how the hell do we process javascript” problem and mostly annoyed my colleagues with “did you test this and that?”. In the meantime I organized and hosted a few meetups in the DHI silicon rounabout offices, worth mentioning Codebar and the Global Day of Code Retreat with the folks at @8thligh.
But of course, all this was only during our spare time. Our true main activity at the office was playing street-fighter.
Or sumo.
What didn’t go that well
Despite the overall good work we carried on I still feel a few things could have been done in a different (better) way:
- We had very little customer interaction. This is a industry-wide problem and WorldDigital was no exception, it’s like engineers have to be isolated from the world so that they can’t be distracted and can be “managed” properly. I think this is a massive missed opportunity as it’s from customer interaction that you create real value.
- The way we estimated things was broken, and we knew that. Unfortunately we forgot to tell managers who, by manual, treated them as deadlines. Quite a mess.
A big thank you
Working with the WorkDigital team was a turning point in my career. I learnt a lot, it was a great experience and I met some great people. I really couldn’t ask for more.
To the whole team, a big thank you. You guys really made my days.
What is next
My next adventure is starting soon and it will be a blast. Just stay tuned.
