Regent Street in 11 hours
In 11 hours time I will walk into the office of a client just off Regent Street in London, dressed in a shirt, tie, khaki jeans, and brown shoes. I will have have pretended to know my way around London as I sleepily make my way across the Bakerloo line from Paddington, and will then pretend to be clever for a number of hours while sitting in gargantuan offices that beggar belief. Let's not suppose that I will look at Google Street View in a few minutes to figure out how to find my destination.
I always stress out before going on-site with a client for the first time.
In reality I stress over nothing -the coming week is going to be fun. I am pretending to be a teacher once again. I always imagine the people I am training will know more than methat I will be caught outexposed as an imposter. Of course the opposite always becomes obvious within minutes. It's strange reallyworking with such a diverse range of clients around the place. I guess in many ways you might equate developers working for solution providers like automobile mechanics. We've seen so many systems that much of our knowledge is organised as a vast library of references that read something like “I read something about this somewhere”and we are expertsat searching Google. Yes, we know the basics of all sorts of computer languages, and the older (read:cynical) among us have vast swathes of experience (read:bitterness), but that doesn't mean we always know every answer.
While not blowing my trumpet on this far flung outpost of the internet, I'm going to say I'm one of the better web developers I've ever known. I'm not the cleverestnot by a long chalkbut that's not always such a good thing. I write code that I can pick up in the future. I write code that clients can make sense of. A lot of that comes from having written open source code in the pastand the need to make things clear, concise, and maintainable. Maintainable is really the magic word when it comes to professional code monkeyingmaking it such that somebody else can come along and realise how the thing you invented works without too much trouble.
As an aside, I just drank a rather large glass of wine. If it has influenced the words in this post, I will not apologise. Perhaps a certain degree of alcohol unlocks a certain degree of truthmuch as it also unlocks world championship winning pool table skills for at least one or two games, until you drink the next drink and become a buffoon once more.
So anywayI travel to London on the early train in the morning. I will travel armed with a Kindle, my mobile phone, my work laptop, and not much else. It's going to be fun.