talking to china

A few weeks ago, my boss called the group together (6 engineers and one QA guy), and said "Everything we're working on here is going Elsewhere." Most of it is going to our Beijing office. The project I've been working on for the last year is going to Dallas. In return, we get a project that Dallas had just started, and we get some bits of technology from Stockholm.

So now we have to distill years worth of experience and deep understanding into a number of 2-hour teleconference training sessions. Or rather, frobzwiththingz and tactical_grace have to do that. I talked for a little over an hour, and got to say things like "You don't need to understand the internals of this. It's open source, it's been tested on more platforms than we have available, and it just works. Port it, test it, and call it a day. (Also, our customers don't seem to be using it.)" Plus, all the real details they might need to know are in a number of ancillary documents I wrote. PowerPoint is good for overviews, bad for deep understanding. When all the training classes are over, we're sending one guy there for two weeks to do the real work of getting them up to speed on building and debugging our code.

Owing to time difference, I started at 8pm, which is 9am Friday morning for them. There was no earthly need for me to go into the office for this, so I did the class from the comfort of my own dining room. Talking to these guys was a bit like talking to the plates - not a lot of feedback. They may be completely overwhelmed with the fire hose of information, or their English may not be so good. Or both. More reason to put the real details in the ancillary documents, and let this class just be an overview.

Anyway, it's done, and I can go back to working on Arisia.

scary power tools

While I'm here and posting things, here's something I recently found (and left) in my neighbor's trash.



Yes, it really is as flimsy and as dangerous as it looks. OTOH, he probably treated it with the caution (and phear) it deserves.