Nilsson har hund

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The Reading slideshow

The train for Reading departed the same afternoon. It was a hot Sunday in the middle of October. I was sweating as stood waiting for the bus for the train station. A dark grey suit was way too hot for the weather, but trying to reduce my luggage even more I had packed only a weekend case for the two week training course. Figuring I could use the hotel valeting service in the same way as I had been doing for the past two weeks in Nottingham. Up until about now I have had a rose tinted view of the jet set way of staying at hotels. The novelty was starting to wear thin. Arriving in Reading I entered a carbon copy of my Nottingham hotel room. Same hotel chain, same kind of shower pod. The only noticable difference was the view from the window and the fact that this room mirrored that of Nottingham.

This time I came prepared. I had changed my phone provider to one that actually offered Internet. Unfortunately, the Macbook I brought with me from work did not like to tether (connect to the Internet via the phone) without some serious configuration. It was better than accepting the generous offer of marginally faster hotel wifi for nine pounds a day, though.

After some miscommunication on which coach actually had our reserved seats, I had joined up with my new colleague Y on the platform in Derby. We were on route to gain some ground on how to extend the web business platform that had been used by the company for some time. She had been working for a good month before I started, but neither of us really had any good overview on what we were doing, only having peeled the outer layers of this big onion of a website. I had spent some time reading documentation in the form of annotated and spiral bound power point slides. I thought the training would be different. I was wrong.

In the morning of the first day of training we were handed a familiar looking block of spiral bound paper. These were the fancy looking main UK offices of the american service provider. We sat in a room with a bunch of other people of other businesses from around the country, who had all come for this set of training courses. Day after day we flipped thorugh the pages of slides, listening to the instructor and did the coding exercises that concluded each chapter. The exercises were largely about copying code by hand from the printed examples and following another 30-odd-point bulleted list of detailed instructions. While the slides provided some explanation on to why bullet point 28 was a really important step, it usually lacked the generality to allow one to understand how to go beyond the basic instructions. What I really wanted was a set of guidelines and best practices, to avoid accidentally walking up cul de sacs of development that the original designers had not had in mind.

Enlightenment was not part of the things I brought back from Reading. I bought myself a duvet and a pillow for my new flat though, which would both prove to be very useful in the weeks to come.

Reading looks boring, so here is a photo of the Cray-1 on display at the London science museum that I visited on one of the Reading weekends.