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.

Inceptions, Estimations, Procrastinations

Currently playing: Beborn Beton. Check them out =) 


"It's a Pedophile Dating Site!" - Quote of the day from Errol


Who would have thought training would be...well REAL project work? This week, the other business analysts and I have been gathering project requirements (inception) for ThoughtWorks Chronicles, an internal application that will be used to pass on and archive the oral history of ThoughWorks. Which I think is a fantastic idea. How better than to preserve a great community culture? I say community and not company, because it honestly feels more like a community of coworkers (I haven't grown tired of seeing them yet! Even though I see them almost 24/7).

Inception is a bit difficult to explain without going into a bunch of BA (Business Analyst) jargon which will most likely sound like blahbatyblahblahblah to a lot of people.  Long story short, the BA finds out what functionalities the client wants to build in the application and conveys this to a team of developers. It may sound easy conceptually, but in reality it feels a bit more like this...

Today we finished our estimations for our project scope and tomorrow we will be writing detailed user stories around each piece of functionality. Monday we will start the first iteration of development!

Also, recap - Tuesday night we had a pub quiz where we broke off into teams and got to answer a quiz about really random questions about things from different countries, questions related to ThoughtWorks, and things we've learned in class. Our team came in second! I'd like to think it's because the first place team had Patti Mandarino, one of the first few ThoughtWorkers ever, and she knew all the ThoughtWorks history :D. I was just proud that I could answer one of the sports questions - who won the Stanley Cup this year. Ha!

Well there's been a WHOLE lot more that's happened and I don't have time to write about. I will try to catch up next time! =)

Causing a Ruckus and Shopping

ThoughtWorkers definitely work hard and play hard! Friday night we had a ridiculous party where we finished off a lot of drinks, played card games from different countries, and sang karaoke (well I wasn't part of the singing but it was definitely loud). Sahana has some great pics on her flickr and you can see more of my pics on my facebook.

We also ordered lots of food. Some of it was delivered in bags...

All in all it was a great night. I retired early so I could play Team Fortress 2 with my boyfriend, and I stayed up till about 3am jumping around shooting at things. It was pretty awesome.

Saturday was spent shopping on MG road. 

We bought a good amount of stuff...

picture courtesy of Sahana

What made my night was this store. 

They sold a ton of metal/alternative band shirts. I bought 2 Rammstein shirts, and an Arch Enemy shirt. On a side note, I love that Arch Enemy has a female vocalist in a genre that is predominately male. I was really surprised to learn that metal is apparently popular in Bangalore, although I still haven't seen much of a scene here. There's still time to look though!

ThoughtWorks University

More updates on TWU! I started writing this yesterday but I passed out...


Day 3 - Lego Game and Open Space

Today we played the lego game in class. For those of you unfamiliar with the lego game, it is a game that shows how an agile team functions by having team members work on a project for a client. In our case, we were making an animal. We had to create an animal based on client requirements and deploy functional parts for testing in each iteration...needless to say I think we did pretty well in teamwork and communication, and here is the result!

We then had some open spaces where we talked about topics interesting to us. One of our trainers, Johnathan helped me setup an open space to talk about relationships in consulting and we discussed some interesting things, such as using NLP techniques for persuasive power, professionalism, and how cultures define relationships. 

Sumeet had a great open space about Social Responsibility, which ThoughtWorks is a HUGE supporter of (and why I love this company! Check out their awesome values!) The three organizations we talked about were: Parikrma, Sukrupa, and 350.org. You should check them out!

Day 4 (Today) - Getting down to business!

This morning we had some usual games and activities, and in the afternoon we really got down to business! We really got a sense of the Business Analyst role in the upcoming project we will be working on - ThoughtWorks Chronicles (I will explain this project more later). Tomorrow we will be meeting the client (Summet wearing a hat) in order to gather information and project requirements so that we can start writing stories for our developers. It's going to be hard work and a lot of fun!

I am currently in one of the TWU offices in Bangalore working on some homework. 

Recap - TWU Day 2

I meant to upload this video earlier, but had a lot of trouble with internet speed. Damon and I rode in a rickshaw on the second day of TWU....here is the fantastic video of traffic in India!

ThoughtWorks is like....

DisneyWorld for nerds!
Ok maybe more of a Dave & Busters for grown up nerds. 


One of the main reasons I've decided to take up blogging again is in anticipation for my upcoming trip to ThoughtWorks University in Bangalore India. I was suppose to have left on Tuesday but my business visa got delayed. Thankfully I got it yesterday so I am leaving tomorrow for India. My excitement level for this trip is pretty high up there, comparable to first day of college, graduation day of college, first paying freelance gig, first metal show where I got to jump in the mosh pit...yep life changing events =)


This has been my first week at ThoughWorks, most of which I've spent at the "beach" learning Java and Testing as part of Agile Software Development. The people here are super friendly and talented. I got to sit next to expert developer and recent TWU grad SgHill who helped me learn some basic coding. I was so proud of myself for finally finishing a calendar program after a full day of coding...which probably would have taken some of the awesome developers here 10 minutes to code T___T. 


The rest of today I plan on learning some SQL and go through some great tutorials at Industrial Logic. Then, off to packing and you'll get to hear from me when I land in India!


SG Hill and I have strikingly similar appearance all the way down to our D&G glasses and beards.

Picture curtesy of SG Hill.