I know I haven't been at Cisco very long, but it became apparent that the position wasn't a good fit for me after a few months. Life is too short to waste any of it, so I've moved on and accepted a position at an exciting local startup.
I'll be starting at 6th Sense Analytics next week. If you haven't looked over there products, I'd encourage you to do so. Their products for automatically capturing what type of work people are doing, then determining product state (among many other things) is very cool.
I'm hesitant to describe too much because I haven't started working at 6th Sense yet, and I have a lot to learn about the tools, but here's a little.
Is everyone on the team writing new code? Do they traditionally need a week of testing and editing to get the new features stable? This tool will catch that. When everyone says "We're ready to Ship It!", this tool will provide a simple tool that can say "Actually, you need some time to let the code stabilize... it's still changing significantly every day. You'll be able to ship in two weeks if people stop pushing new code and clean up what's in place."
How much time does your team spend writing automated tests versus new code? Again, this can help you individually, or as a team, to realize you're out of sync with your team.
I've got a lot to learn about the 6th Sense tools, but I'm very excited about this new opportunity.
The one downside? I got lazy. Instead of submitting a talk to Ruby Conf, I let Cisco pay for it... since RubyConf is this weekend, I'm not going.
I probably could've just paid for it myself (Cisco's been very flexible), but I've had a few weekends at home in a row, and it's kind of nice. :) But I'll miss everyone at RubyConf. Blog a lot for me guys!
btw, I still get questions from people about Cisco writing software...(I thought they only made routers??) This was my group. Yes, there are teams at Cisco writing software. Some of it's very cool stuff too.
