In Prague for this year’s 1337 conference, which starts tomorrow. I’ll be holding a talk tomorrow afternoon and I had hoped to prepare earlier but somehow kept not finding time, so I spent most of my flight here working on my presentation. I’m looking forward to the conference weekend as a whole and I’m feeling pretty confident about the talk – I hope the audience will find it interesting.

The team has been working on a large project since February, and today we finally deployed the first part of it. Mostly we do no-downtime deployments but this time we made such deep-going changes that we would have to shut down the system for the deployment. The client absolutely would not accept any downtime during normal working hours, so we deployed at 5:30 in the morning. By the afternoon (when we celebrated with some cake) we were pretty knackered, and the celebration wasn’t exactly lively.

Workday breakfast.

I have no appetite early in the morning. The ideal time for breakfast is just short of 2 hours after waking up. So I normally have breakfast at my desk at work. Usually it’s a few slices of Eric’s home-baked bread, and a glass of nice juice.

We finished a project and celebrated with ice cream in the sun.

Happy day! Finally, finally, after more than a year, I got a second monitor at work. The company is very sensible and progressive about most things but for some reason the standard setup only includes a single monitor. I think it may be because most of the developers who sit in the office are between projects, and those who have a project are mostly at the customers’ offices, using whatever equipment is there. In fact this is so non-standard that the desks barely fit two monitors.

Other important things on my desk:

A pad of sticky notes.
A Pilot gel pen. (Ballpoint pens are abominable.)
A “Red – Green – Refactor” TDD pyramid.
A mouse pad with wrist support. I’ve had it for so long that I can’t even remember when I got it. It, and the mouse on it, have been following me from office to office since 2008 at least.
A Valrhona chocolate bar.

Some of the walls at our office have been painted with whiteboard paint. This one displays a mixture of content from design discussions and visiting kids.

First day at work.

The new office has excellent facilities for cyclists. There are secure parking rooms for bikes, and clean, spacious showers. No more parking under the bridge!

tretton37 moved into a new Stockholm office, since the old one was bursting at the seams. There were usually nearly enough desks for everyone, but the lack of meeting rooms was such that we were sometimes forced to have meetings in nearby cafés or even to rent office space.

The new office is not only larger but better in all ways. It is in an even better location. It has plenty of daylight from large windows, better soundproofing than the old office, and even a bicycle garage. And because we have all this space (so much of it that one could almost get lost here!) we also have room for luxuries such as several sofa/lounge areas, a ping-pong table and even lockers for the employees.

tretton37 has a ninja theme so the interior decoration riffs on that.

Much conferencing during the day.

The best part by far was a web app security workshop where we got to hack a web app with a bunch of vulnerabilities built into it. It was a lot of fun; I’ve always wanted to try this kind of thing – SQL injection and script injection and accessing other users’ shopping carts and so on.

During our free time before dinner I went for a walk through the little parks along the canal. I don’t know about the rest of Riga, but the parks were lovely. More than just green spaces, they had sculptures, fountains, colourful plantings etc.

There is something magical about the combination of greenery and water. Greenery is nice; water is nice; the two together are more nice than the sum of the parts.