Training Camp

The time has come, I need to change something and I already know what it is. I want to join the best of the best. I want to be at the forefront of development. I want to deliver best quality software. I want to deliver it fast. I want to see that light int the eyes of people when I present them what I do. I want to have fun every day. I want to be agile.

They are also saying that they pay well...

And they train you while you are fighting for them.

And there is time for innovation. Great! Let's go for it!

The only problem is that joining the best of the best requires Me to be the best. But I am not. Actually, I am pretty good. When I shoot code, it usually brings value. The only thing is that it just explodes afterwards... And all this talk about TDD and SOLID, it seems a little bit overrated, isn't it?

This were many things that constantly banged my mind before I made first step - I wrote down CV. Then I literally sent it to every offer in the internet that had a 'agile' keyword inside. I tried banging on the doors of the most popular companies and I responded to vague offers from agencies. I decided not to be picky as long as I could join a real world agile company. Oh, yeah and I thought the best city in Europe for such a task will be London. Not that far from home, but far enough to make me feel I am changing my life.

After countless emails and few phone calls I got my first serious offer. The head hunter arranged phone interview due to distance between me and the company.

Phone interview? No problem. It's just talking about stuff. Right?

Just before the phone call my heart was pounding and I crossed my room like 1000 times there and back again. And it used to be quite big room!

The first part of the interview was a little like a cultural interview. I was asked about the book I read recently (and mentioned in cover letter - The Agile Samurai: How Agile Masters Deliver Great Software). I was asked about my values, and why I wanted to work in the agile environment. It was all pretty obvious and easy. I really wanted to work in the agile company. But then technical questions came. And I thought that I know something about development:

- Do you know what the acronym SRP stands for?
- Not really.
- Then do you know what is single responsibility principle?
- I guess it's that each class in a program should be responsible for one thing only? - Yeah I was not that sure
- Do you know what is dependency inversion?
- It is when you do no want to bind classes to each other, so you use external library to do that. - If you are not aware I didn't seen difference between DI and IOC at this time
- Do you know what Open-Closed principle means?
- Not really.
- Do you know why the 'var' keyword was introduced
- As a syntactic sugar, so that you do not need to write full class name when it is obvious.
- Not exactly...

And it went like this... At the end the voice said: "Thank you do you have any questions for us?". And I did had questions about their agile practices, about continous improvement and so. The heck, I want to get from this call as much as I can about real world agile. After all this talk I felt sad and devasted. I went to the backyard and started to cut wood into pieces.

For some hard to understand reason they still wanted me to come to the face to face interview. YEAH!

I got to do also a programming exercise. It was about writing discount logic for an internet shop. I did my best. I took free time from work and I spent day and night before deadline doing everything by TDD, trying to structure code the best I could. I was pretty proud of the outcome. I had full suite of unit tests, quite extensive set of integration tests and all requirements of the task were written down as the acceptance tests. I learned unit testing library well and used it for all tests types. I had no time to learn IOC library, so I did all injections by hand in constructors. I overcame few automation obstacles which arouse from using only free tools in .NET environment. And it refreshed my git skills. After all I want to best, right? The code was sent. And once again I had time to sleep.

But not for a long...

Head hunter actually saw that my chances are rising after company viewed the code, so he set up another interview for the same day. This other company also had as part of their interview code test done before hand. This time it was building console interpreter of robot moves. I had the experience but, the time was short. I had skipped one night sleeping (just before filght to London) and once again I did my best. I sent half finished code (but with Unit, Integration and Acceptance tests) just 2 hours before my flight departures. I downloaded all information about SOLID code and Object Oriented design I could and I hoped for the best! Just before I got to the airport the head hunter called me saying he made an appointment for yet one more interview. Chances of getting into agile were high! And all I learned on the way was already to my benefit.

After all I could also be agile. And I could do TDD. And I had acceptance tests. I can join the best of the best.