A lot of people don’t like change. In all the 20 or so years that I lived with my parents in our first house we never once changed the furniture around in the living room. It was all my mother’s fault. She just didn’t like to change things and when she was happy with something, then that was the way it would stay. My brother and I certainly tried to persuade her to maybe move the TV to another corner and swap the sofa and armchair around, and maybe put the cheese plant over there. But she wouldn’t have it. So it never changed.

I, on the other hand, relish change. It’s not that I get bored of things the way they are, it’s just that I find changing things around can be refreshing. When my brother moved into my house we decided to shift some of the furniture around upstairs (the bedroom) to give him a bit more space and still leave an area free for me to use my weights. The space saved was pretty small but the psychological change made the room feel much larger and more welcoming. There’s no rational argument for it, but I suppose “a change is as good as a rest”.

So with this spirit in mind I’m trying to adapt to the fact that we’re moving rooms at work. When I joined the company for the first time (this is my second spell with them) over 3 years ago the development team lived downstairs in a large room alongside the managers and the customer engineers lived upstairs. Our company builds machines so it was decided that part of the bottom floor would be converted to do the assembly, the development team moved upstairs and the managers moved into a new room at the other side of the building. And that’s how things have stayed. And it’s been great. The upstairs roof is really high, with wooden rafters, air conditioning, large windows with views out over a wooded area filled with squirrels and the like. It’s fair to say that it’s lovely.

But change is afoot. We’ve had a couple of spells of downsizing and are half the size we used to be. So we’re rattling around in a huge office with enough room to each swing a grizzly bear around without fear of interference from each other (assuming the grizzlies don’t mind). So the company’s decided to sub-let upstairs to another company and we’ll move back downstairs again and things will be kind of like they used to. Except they won’t.

There two very large glass doors downstairs that used to provide a lot of light into the room and hide the fact that the rest of the windows are very small. Unfortunately, the room is now divided into two rooms with a wall and door in between. This means that the room we’ll be moving in to has a lot less light and ambiance than it used to. And doesn’t compare to the place we’re moving from. So some people aren’t happy about it. It’s not the dot com boom any more so people like us can’t just shake our rattles and get what we want (those were the days) so we have to make do.

But if I’m honest, I’m quite looking forward to it. Simply because it’s going to be different and therefore a bit of fun for a while (until the novelty wears off). I could be negative and say we’re getting the rough end of the stick (all the nice rooms are ear-marked for customer demos or constructing machines) and that by sub-letting upstairs we’re going to be a bit screwed if we want to expand again when the economy improves.

No. I’d rather be positive and say it’s a new beginning. The dawn of a new era (to use my favourite, over-used expression). I won’t have such a nice view out the window as I do at the moment (I’m watching a grey squirrel foraging for food right now) and the work will remain the same, but with some more lighting and some plants dotted around the place it should take on a character of its own. Only time will tell, and Friday is the day of the move. I might take pictures at 20 minute intervals and do one of those photo sequences where an empty room is transformed into a bustling office…

In my line of work there is a requirement to be creative at certain times. As a software engineer I will admit that I do spend a fair amount of my time surfing the internet. And I’ll admit that a certain percentage of that time is spent looking at non-work-related material. I also spend a fair amount of time doing tedious things like testing and bug fixing. These essential parts of the software development process have to be done (we’re all human and make mistakes and it is impossible to write bug free code - I don’t care what you say) and in fact they make up the majority of my working time.

I spend perhaps 80% of my time doing unexciting things, some of them pretty dull. So that leaves 20% of my time to do the less unexciting things (you’ll note that I didn’t say “exciting things”). For me the most interesting thing about writing software is the stage where you have a general idea of what you want to create, but need to come up with some neat way of doing that. It could be a clever piece of user interface or a neat way of designing some code to accomplish some complex task. Quite often I can draw upon past experience and just do the same again^TM. But sometimes I need to come up with a completely new idea. To create something from scratch. And doing that can be an interesting process.

Creativity is a difficult thing to measure and control. Like growing a plant you can’t force it to happen. Highly creative people tend (in my experience) to be passionate people who can very quickly go from states of high creativity to nothing at all. Some, like the author Douglas Adams, suffered from long periods of writer’s block. I expected when I started this site to have periods when I couldn’t write anything at all and I pictured myself tearing my hair out trying to think of what to write about. This hasn’t happened (unlucky for you) and I believe it’s due to the fact that I’ve worked out how to control my own creative flow.

I’m a pretty disciplined guy and am not prone to mood swings and emotional outbursts. This means I don’t have to rely on flashes of inspiration to make decisions. I just sit back and think about problems and try to solve them logically, with varying degrees of success. While I’m doing that - going through as many possibilities as I can - ideas will just magically pop into my head. Most of them are ridiculous, but thinking about them gives me more ideas and they build on top of each other until I have a few sensible solutions. The one thing I never do is put pressure on myself.

I firmly believe that pressure is self-imposed. If your boss is breathing down your neck to have that report on his desk in one hour sharp then you might argue that he is putting pressure on you. I on the other hand don’t give a damn about my boss’s wrath. I am no respecter of rank - if you are a beggar in the street or the Emperor of Earth then I’ll treat you just the same. We’re all just people at the end of the day. So if I don’t have it on his desk in one hour then so what? In a thousand years time I don’t see historians saying “the fall of modern civilisation was triggered by John not finishing that report on time”. So by not really bothering about the outcome I am free to actually get on with the task unhindered and guess what? I easily got it in on time. And it was the best darned report my boss ever read! Cue the future historians saying “the reason civilisation is still here today was that John managed to finish that report on time”. The point is, you put pressure on yourself.

So without pressuring myself to be creative and staying cool (and just being a carefree sort of guy) it just seems to happen. I recall reading about Douglas Adams after he was paid an advance to write his next book. He worked out how much he was getting paid to write each word by extrapolating how long the book was going to be. The pressure of getting paid a considerable amount of money just to write the word “it” got the better of him and just extended his writer’s block. Poor fellah.

I always used to pride myself on having perfect 20-20 vision. I had excellent long range sight (I could spot an ant walking across the road from 100m away - nearly) and I never needed a magnifying glass to look at something small - like I said, I had 20-20 vision. Well, those days are long gone.

About 18 months ago I started to feel really tired. I was playing a lot of football and running quite a lot so I assumed it was that. So I had a relaxing weekend and felt fine come Monday morning. But by Friday I was feeling knackered again. Once again by Monday I was fine and the following Friday I was ready to drop. The thought of my eyes being the problem didn’t enter my head, I just assumed that it was my bright monitor at work so I turned it down to be a bit darker. This didn’t work.

Eventually I relented and went to the optician to have an eye test. After the test the guy gave me a frame with the lenses that were my actual prescription and I was amazed. I looked at some writing in a book and it was perfectly in focus. My eyes didn’t have to work to zoom in on the text. But the thing was, I never realised how much work my eyes were putting in until they could see properly again. It was great, but terrible. Now I’d need to wear glasses whenever I read or used a computer. Although on the plus side they’d make me look more intelligent - which they do.

But just lately I’ve been having the same eye-strain problems. Feeling tired. Struggling to focus on distant objects when driving home. But the strange thing is that I’ve been wearing my glasses when sitting in front of a computer or reading the paper. So I went to have my eyes tested again (thinking my prescription might have changed in the last year and a half). But alas no. My eyes are just as they were. The optician suggested that I might like to spend less time in front of a computer screen and that I probably just had old-fashioned eye strain. Well, changing career is not an option. So I tried to stare at the screen less and look out the window more. It didn’t seem to work though.

But then I tried something else. I just stopped wearing my glasses altogether. And you know what? It worked. No eye strain any more and I’m not having any problems reading books either. Bizarre. It just doesn’t make any sense to me but it seems to be working. My working theory is that without the glasses I spend less time staring at things than when I’m wearing them. This strains my eyes less and Bob’s your uncle. Funny how sometimes doing the opposite to what you think will work can sometimes give you the desired effect…

Yesterday was a tough day. Apart from the fact that it would have been my mother’s birthday, there were other things going on to make it grim. The company I’m working for has suffered badly from the electronics market slump and has had a few rounds of layoffs in the last 12 months. It’s based in the USA and acquired a UK company 3 years ago (the one I’m now working for) and most of the layoffs had effected our cousins across the Atlantic.

The last time though it did affect us (although it happened before I came). A developer was made redundant along with a couple of application specialists. They are friends of mine so it wasn’t a nice thing to see. Having grown up and seen the steady decline of UK industries on television - with thousands of people being made redundant - it all seemed distant and I felt that “it’d never happen to me”. When I left university I felt almost as though the world owed me a living and earning money was a right I had. Not so. Having seen a few friends made redundant it changed my point of view about employment and money (in other words, don’t take either for granted). I work in a volatile industry where losing your job can be a part of the game, no matter how good you are.

Anyway, back to my original story… Yesterday… Okay, back on track. It turned out that the layoffs last time weren’t enough and it was time for some real cutbacks. So from a team of 18 people, only 11 remain in the UK. Two top-notch developers are out of work (which won’t last long) along with a first-class tester and a few others I won’t get into (otherwise this sentence would be too long and you’d lose the thread half way through). It’s a nasty business and shows that the bottom line for any company is making money, not intellectual pursuits. We’re all expendable assets.

It’s going to be strange working in a significantly smaller team on the same significantly large piece of software (around 1 million lines of code give or take). And all the empty desks that remain are going to take a bit of getting used to. And if the company expands in the future it’s going to be damn hard to get the caliber of people we’ve just lost. What I will do, however, is start saving more money. You never know when you’re going to be out on your ear!

On a more positive note though, a large number of middle managers have been removed from the US side of the company - and I don’t have a problem with that. If you’re in a relatively small company and your job is to manage other managers and spend your working life in meetings, then you’re not really contributing to making money. I’m not a big fan of meetings, unless some decisions actually need to be made. Going to meetings just because they’re in your diary doesn’t sound particularly proactive to me… That’s why I like being a software developer, I don’t need to try and justify my position and self-importance in meetings, I can do it by doing what I do best - writing world-class software!

As far as I can tell, I am driving my car along a dimly lit road. I say dimly lit, but I’m not really paying attention. I’m looking at the passenger seat next to me. I’m not alone. Somebody else is looking too. Then they say what I’m thinking: “That milk’s never coming out”. And I have to agree. Suddenly the passenger seat is under water and my passenger is gone, and this doesn’t seem strange. Silence. And then noise. A piercing, all-encompassing noise. I am looking at the thing that is making the noise, but I can’t understand what the hell it is or how to shut it up. Then it comes to me. It is my alarm and I need to press the “off” button. Which I do.

7.30am Now I am awake, and the dream is fading away. Logic and sense is starting to return and I realise that it is time to get up and have a shower. Which I do. The usual nausea hits me, but not for long. And soon I’m brushing me teeth, trying to shake off the urge to close my eyes and go back to bed. Focus!

Clothing selection for me isn’t very hard. I just grab a bunch of clothes and put them on. I’m a bit of a GAP kid and therefore have a wardrobe full of plain, uninteresting clothes that can be worn in almost any configuration (I do have a large collection of Hawaiian shirts, but that’s another article altogether). As a programmer I don’t need to wear a suit so I just try to look semi-respectable, with varying degrees of success. I drive straight to work and arrive by about 8am (first in). Now the day begins.

8am After dropping my packed lunch off in the fridge, I sit down at my desk and switch my monitor on. Okay, I’ve got a tried and tested routine for the first thing in the morning at work that I fondly refer to as “getting up to speed”. First I check my e-mail. Nothing interesting. I log into Yahoo! messenger, ICQ and MSN messenger. A couple of my “buddies” are online, but I’ll leave them alone for now. They probably feel as lethargic as I do. I’ve got a message I missed from yesterday saying “cool”. [Mental note: reply to it a bit later].

8.15am Now I try to figure out what interesting things have happened in the world since last night. I go to BBC News Online and spend a bit of time doing exactly that. David Beckham (the saviour of English football, apparently) is going to be fine after injuring his ankle. The Queen mother’s death is still top of the UK news. And the Israel-Palestine conflict rages on as it has done for my entire life. I’m starting to feel ready to do some work now. But just before I do, I go for a bit of light entertainment and have a read of Dear Deirdre on The Sun website - there are so many people out there that seem to have enough complicated sex lives to fill a thousand years of Mills and Boons novels.

8.35am Okay, figure out what I was doing at the end of yesterday so I can pick up where I left off. The development team I’m working in is in the middle of re-writing the user interface (the bit you see and use) of a large piece of software. I’m currently tasked with re-writing a small part of that large project (like eating an elephant, you need to eat it a small piece at a time).

I check my notes and see that I was in the middle of figuring out the use cases for the software component I’m working on (i.e. writing down all the possible things a user would do with it so I can figure out if the spec is missing anything out). So I fire up the previous version of the application and have a run-through of the existing system (i.e. look at the component I’m re-writing to get myself into the flow).

9.30am Everyone else is in the office now, although it’s pretty quiet, and I’m hungry. So I take a packet of Quaker Oatso Simple and wander down to the kitchen and the awaiting microwave. After two sessions of 1.5 minutes punctuated by stirring, I’m walking back upstairs with hot bowl in hand. Of course, I can’t do any work while eating a hot cereal, but I can quickly read a few weblog articles on the net. Which I do.

9.45am Okay, back to work for real this time! Rather than writing code today I’m really wracking my brain instead. I’m basically taking a specification for a piece of software, making it exist inside my head, and then using it (inside my head) and seeing if it all works according to plan. It’s surprisingly hard to do actually, because it’s too easy to just think “ach, nae bother, it’s all fine, back to the net”. But the trouble is that when I come along and write the code and it doesn’t work, then it’s about 100 times harder to sort it out. The key is to work out all the problems on a piece of paper first - it’s easier to change a piece of paper than 50,000 lines of code.

11.00am A short burst of swearing from behind me alerts me to the fact that two of my colleagues are playing Yahoo! Pool. This breaks my concentration sufficiently for me to go downstairs and make myself a cup of tea. Remembering to put the milk in AFTER the tea bag (27 years before I learned that lesson), I make and proceed to drink an almost perfect cup of tea. Apparently, if you are in “the zone” and someone distracts you out of “the zone” (like by asking “are you in the zone?”), it can take up to 15 minutes to get back into “the zone”. Read more about “the zone” here (scroll down to point 8). Eventually I get back to writing down the fruit of my thinking - a bullet pointed list of tasks users will perform on the software.

12.00pm Lunchtime! After eating my sandwiches (prawn cocktail and ham actually - very nice), I challenge one of the guys to Yahoo! Pool. Naturally I lose both games (potted the black and the cue ball on the first game, just got beaten by better play on the second). Then I play another colleague and luckily manage to win. In the process I keep missing long pots to the corner pockets, so I go on a practice table and proceed to miss 12 identical long pots in a row. I give up, close the game down, and do a bit more news surfing (seen a picture of David Beckham’s ankle bandage - very flashy). I also have a quick conversation on Yahoo! Messenger (do I sound like a Yahoo! salesman or something?) about the bowling game last night (won 2 games out of 4 - I normally come last in almost every game), and how drunk he got, and how hungover he is.

1.00pm Back to the grindstone. I’m playing around with the screenshots of the software I’m away to write, moving buttons around and that sort of thing. Having finished that I’m writing more detailed descriptions of the use cases for the software, really fleshing it out. For that I am periodically calling on the services of my esteemed colleagues for some quick chats. I guess the thing about working in a team of software developers is to work as an individual and just communicate with the team members when it’s required. If you sit 6 developers around a table and try to get them to make a decision, it just won’t happen. Any more than 2 will bicker until long after the cows have come home. I’m also updating the full system source code to pick up changes other developers have made so I’m working with the latest version of the software.

3.00pm I’ve finished writing the list and confirmed it with another couple of guys (it’s impossible for 1 person to see all the angles at once). Peer review - it’s the only way to avoid major cock-ups. Time for another cup of tea.

3.20pm It’s schedule time. Using an Excel spreadsheet, I’m working out how much time each step of the development is going to take. It’s confirmation really as the guy who wrote the spec also wrote a schedule. But it’s suicide to agree to work to someone else’s schedule without even looking at it. A fair bit of the work has been done already so I’m deducting the time that’s been spent.

4.00pm I feel happy about what I’m doing now. I suppose with experience you get to know when you’re ready to stop planning and start writing code and I have an internal fear-sense that makes me worry that I’m getting in over my head. Once that fear disappears (by figuring out what I need to do) I know I’m ready to go. And I’ll start delving into the code and actually writing some tomorrow morning. I’m just writing my to-do list to order the main pieces of work I’ll need to do over the next month or so and inserting little things that are too small to go in the main schedule but will need to be done. If I don’t write it down I’ll have forgotten in 24 hours and it’ll never happen.

4.30pm The end of the day. Just enough time to do some last-minute email checking and news reading before packing up my troubles in my old kit bag and nicking off home.

4.35pm Now I’m driving home, listening to some Teenage Fanclub on the stereo and singing (out of key) along to the lyrics. And very quickly work is out of my head and I turn back into a dithering Scotsman.

5.00pm I’m winding down by doing keepie-ups with a football and kicking it against a wall.

Well, I’m not going to bore you with what I do on my evenings (leaving room for future articles). What? You think that was a pretty boring day and you were right all along about computer nerds? Maybe. And I don’t like your attitude by the way! But it’s fun. A chance to be creative and organised. It’s full of constant challenges and you get the chance to solve a problem in a clever way, patting yourself on the back for being so smart. Although if you do your job right, the users of the software don’t even notice they’re using it. So by being successful you keep a low profile. Strange way to make a living? Maybe. But isn’t all work?

After an 8 month sabbatical, I’m back working in the delightful countryside of Yorkshire. When I worked here before I hadn’t had the experience of working in a large city before, so a stint in Leeds and London soon sorted that out. I’m quite happy to be back in the country again, but I do miss some of the perks of the city…

I’m working on Broughton Hall Estate, which, according to the website, is:

“One of the most successful and prestigious business locations in the UK, Broughton Hall Business Park is set amidst 3000 acres of beautiful Yorkshire parkland and is within easy reach of Manchester, Leeds and Harrogate. The historic listed buildings have been carefully and aesthetically converted to high quality office accommodation with sophisticated communications, ample free parking, peace and security.”

Sounds nice, and it really is. The offices are surrounded by trees containing squirrels (not all of them), there’s a stream containing trout, stepping stones, some nice paths through the trees and plenty of open fields containing sheep. It’s a tranquil place to work, make no mistake. It also has the clear advantage of being a mere 10 minute drive from my house, as opposed to Leeds, which is a 40 minute train journey or 1 hour drive. The other big plus point is working with a real programming language (well, real hard), C++. Oh yeah, the final plus point is working with some good people, which is nice.

I’m already missing some of the nice things about working in a city though. Swanky sandwich shops, cafés, hustle and bustle, loads of nice looking women walking around all the time (ahem) and being able to put cheques into my bank (the Alliance and Leicester don’t have branches everywhere, unfortunately).

Still, working in the country isn’t bad, some people live in the country and work in the city. And as the quote above states, it’s not far from Harrogate or Leeds. Nice work if you can get it!

The company I am (currently) working for offers software consultancy to our clients - which makes me a contractor without the salary - and has this annoying habit of sending people to various places to do amazingly tedious work. A few weeks ago I got sent to do some bug fixing in Visual Basic (groan) in London. After I got over the shock of having to do such menial work, I got myself booked into a nice 4-star hotel and took the train down on Monday morning with no small amount of dread.

I’d always decided that I wasn’t going to work in London. I’m no fan of cities on the whole, and having visited London a few times I was in no hurry to return. It amazes me when foreigners come on holiday to Britain, only ever see London, and then go home saying what a wonderful time they’ve had. I know people who’ve lived in London their whole lives and have never ventured further away than Brighton! How can a city with a population larger than Scotland be anything other than miserable? Think I’m building up to a massive change of heart? Stay tuned…

The work was, to be fair, pretty tedious. Our client was working towards releasing a piece of VB software to their client that was bought from a third party, who wrote it to do something completely different, and didn’t sell them the documentation or complete source code. Phew. Well, coming from a strong C++ background as I do, it was never going to be very challenging anyway. I was there to just do as I was told and fix whatever bugs appeared during testing. So that was work, and work’s never that interesting at the best of times.

I managed to get booked into the Thistle Marble Arch Hotel in Marble Arch - which was nice. I find I can’t stay sane in a hotel without a gym (I’ve got my own kit at home and the thought of dishonouring it by not staying in shape while away is too much to bear). So I’d spend a bit of time working on my 3000m time on the rowing machine (current p.b. is 11′23″ which ain’t bad for an ex-swimmer who’s never really rowed before).

As I’ve got older I’ve become less interested in the pubs and clubs of towns (not that I really was in the first place), and more interested in the places to eat. And this is where London scored it’s first victory over me. Living near Bradford as I do, I’m partial to curries, and eat rather a lot of them. But that’s just amateur stuff compared to the sushi, Lebanese, Thai, Chinese and other various meals I’ve had down here. No need for room service or fast food - there’s too much quality to choose from. Score one for London.

Then my cousin (who lives down here) took me on a tour of places like the British Museum and the National Art Gallery (I was never prepared for how awestruck I was to stand in front of actual paintings created by Monet himself, I’m still in shock now). Then there was the London Eye - couldn’t be bothered to go up it but it looked impressive in the mist. Stuff like Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament and the normal landmarks like that don’t impress me one bit - I’ve been to Las Vegas and the ruins in the Bekaa Valley, I know what impressive is. However, score two for London.

And, I’ll say this, there are a lot of good looking women in London. Score three then.

While I was walking around in a light jumper, Scotland and Yorkshire were being lashed by torrential rain, wind and cold. So, reluctantly, I’ll give another point to London on that front.

Trouble is, if you like running in the countryside, hiking, mountain biking, or, in fact, anything outdoors at all (other than hailing a taxi), then London is not good. It’s okay in the winter, the days are too short to be bitter about wasting evenings, but come summer time I’d be gutted. And driving to the countryside doesn’t count - there isn’t the terrain (not until Wales), and it defeats the whole point if you have to drive there! Deduct one point.

One thing I’ve noticed on both the streets and the tube is the perpetual state of misery that people seem to be in. The slightest thing makes people explode with rage at other people (magnified tenfold on the tube). Maybe it’s because I’m so laid back and have a strong ethos of enjoying life, but that just seems a lousy form of existence. Deduct another point.

Picture this. I’ve just had another winning day in the office - fixed several bugs and on a roll. I take the tube back to my hotel. Get into my room, drop my bag and switch on the TV. After ascertaining that there’s nothing worth watching (is there ever?) I realise I need to blow my nose. I proceed to do this only to empty the contents of a coal scuttle onto the tissue. Pollution. You may not notice if you live in it all the time, but I do! Deduct one more point for that.

So a point in total.

I know London has an amazing nightlife, loads of famous people, great places to eat, sights worth seeing and has a really vibrant atmosphere. But it’s just not my cup of tea. Nice place to visit and spend a bit of time in, but I’m happy (for now) living where I am. Maybe as I get older and more cynical I’ll change my tune.

Of course, I’m only scratching the surface of what London has to offer, and am probably biased from spending years saying “I’m not going to work there”. For a city person I’m sure it’s nirvana, and they’d probably hate the sort of places I love. But hey, that’s just my opinion!