Home Sweet Home

What a crazy week, I'm home in Chicago. I'm currently writing this as jetlag kills my sleep schedule. I haven't been able to update my blog with so much that's happened, but here's a recap.

Teaching kids about continuous integration and collaboration.

Last thursday a bunch of us went to Sukrupa to visit the children at the school. Sukrupa is a NPO that helps towns find sustainability by providing disadvantaged children with free schooling and their mothers with training and jobs at Sukrupa Creations. We went to spend some time with the kids and do some activities with them. 

First, Kao and I split up the kids into two groups and each of us taught one group how to make an origami crane. One kid surprised me by making the entire crane by himself while I was only on step 3 of the process. It was a bit difficult to teach a group of children that constantly yell "Auntie Auntie I'm done Auntie look Auntie is this right?"

Then we played the Continuous Integration Animal game with them, the same one we got to play the first week of our training. This game is basically having each person draw a body part of an animal as part of a group but without being allowed to talk to the rest of the group. They had a ton of fun putting their mismatched animal parts together and we taught them the importance of communication and collaboration. We also had some kids work in pairs so we could teach them the effectiveness of pair programming in agile software development.

In Johnathan's words "Ok you have to deploy your animal into this QA environment"

Overall it was an amazing and humbling experience...

TW Chronicles Project Release, aka AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

This past week was our last iteration before a planned release and showcase for our client. Needless to say it was hectic. We pulled some late night hours and scrambled up to the last minute before the showcase to commit code. I left work 2 hours before my flight to Chicago and had about an hour to pack up everything. It was hard saying goodbye to everyone but boy am I glad to be back home.

Overall, TWU has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

My next project is in NYC...I'm leaving Monday night! Such is the life of a consultant.