Just last month, shortly after delivering the 1st project release I was responsible for in the company, I have been transferred from frontend HIPS team, to a newly formed then expanded backend cloud computing team.

Everything is different from my previous team and is going to be challenging:

• New team

Half of the members in this team were transferred from frontend team, like me.

• New domain

Data processing of massive volume, MapReduce and the like.

• New platform and tools

Mostly FOSS – GNU, Linux, GCC, binutil and etc.

• New development process

Agile/Scrum

From what I heard (from unofficial channels), none of the transferred engineers had been inquired for his/her inclination of this transfer, which is kinda unusual. However, despites my emotional attachment to previous team, this is a welcome change to me, for the most part.

For starter, I no longer have to put up with the odd behaving Unittesting tool/framework that come with VS2005¹, which by the way, lacks of proper documentation.

Since GNU/Linux is the primary platform for our new projects, now I could work on my choice of desktop environments – GNOME, happily and EFFICIENTLY.

And there is more. For MANY reasons, some 3rd party (including free) libraries, such as Boost, are not viable in my previous projects in the company. But now, with new projects, these restrictions are relaxed significantly. Hooray!

It seems it’s going to be an exciting year and things are gonna get busier, though. Hopefully, there would be sufficient time for leisure and FUN, so I could continue contributing to Open NTL and hack randomly here there.

1. Sometimes, this unittesting tool would take more than 10 minutes to start testing. Some other times, it just wouldn’t work and showed bizarre .Net error messages those I failed to find any human comprehensible explanation anywhere. Then, for reasons I failed to figure out, these errors would usually go away by themselves in a few days. [↩]