As usual the catmatic unconf socrates15 was a great source of inspiration. This time especially around the idea of doing a journeyman-style work.
It was actually the first dinner at SoCraTes, when I spread the word about me looking for new work (since we are closing down uxebu as a company). Someone mentioned that Nicole did this in London, she went to work with five companies for two days each, and ended up working at one of them. That started things for me. At that time I was still looking for the right new job, but quickly realized that I can actually do the journeyman thingy too. Why not just go and work with teams a bit and find out what we can learn from each other. Now that SoCraTes is already over for a couple of days, I had been telling people about the idea, outside of the SoCraTes environment and got mainly positive feedback. Now it is only a matter of executing it.
I am still struggling a bit of how to tell people about the idea. So I just sat down in this cafe here and read what other had written. Corey Haines was the first, if I remember right, but for some reason I went to Peter Kofler's site where he described how he was doing it. I always started out telling people that I am thinking of doing a journeyman-thing, which most people had not been familiar with, since the software craftsmanship movement had not been heard of everywhere. So I always jumped straight to the journeyman-story telling my motivation to become part of a team and pair with people in a company, to find out what I can learn and what I might be able to bring to the table too. If that ends up in a viable fruitful thing for both will have to be seen. But I see lots of opportunity for both to learn. Different experiences, backgrounds and tool sets are already a great start to learn from each other. So I am not only keen on just doing JavaScript work as I did during the last seven years with uxebu. I want to see new things too and share and learn new things. Just today I got the feedback "for food and travel costs you can work here forever", which was not really in the sense of what I imagined, but it maybe was a joke. I hope. So I went to Peter Kofler's site and read how he "sold it" and I think from now on I am doing it like he did.
Part of it I mentioned above, learn new things and share experiences. But one main motivation is also getting around and get to know (new) people and working environments. I want to discuss how we develop software, how craftsmanship is done in places and how we can improve. Shamelessly copying Peter's ideas, I will from now on, sell it as pairing journey. I don't want to be a burden for a team, I want to be another feedback channel. Therefore I want to pair with someone, maybe multiple people and help to improve what we work on. I want to work with you on your code, your project, write tests and refactor with you. I am mainly staying in Munich to do that, so the cost factor will be very easy to satisfy I guess. I just need food and beverage throughout the day. I am actually not aiming for contracts or anything, it shall be a loose relationship. I would like to stay two days with your team and will be working alongside with it. If there is interest from both sides in doing more we can discuss it. If that turns out to become something permanent or long-time let's talk about it, but it's not my intention to make this an application-style test-period, no!
After reading a couple more of Peter's posts I think it will be great to start off every day with a discussion of our expectations so neither of us will hopefully get disappointed throughout the day. At the end of the day a short retrospective on how things went and what was done will summarize the day. I will take the notebook I got for christmas and write down all things I find interesting. I will try to write up things on the weekend, summarize my week and give each company the opportunity to double-check it before releasing it.
First I need to get my personal blog back into shape, so I can do that. I will most probably tweet a lot, which comes naturally for me. And then I will get ready for getting to know many things.
If you are interested in hosting me, just ping me either on twitter or send me an email. And let's discuss details.
Thank's for the link love ;-)
That sounds like a good plan. I see you covered several things which were problematic for me so I am sure you will be fine.
Go for it!