Its been two years in at IBM, so that is about time for the “I’ve Been Moved” pseudonym to take affect. Starting this past week (since I was on vacation the week prior) I left the yellow box plastered walls of Lotus and head to a group inside of the CIO office.
The short of it is, I’m moving away from product development toward prototype/research development. Not research in the academic sense (though I did consider that), but research in the sense of experimenting, learning, and innovating.
… intermission
Please remember that I’m not IBM, so these thoughts are 100% owned by Timothy J. Finley and not HAL^h^h^hIBM.
…And for the longer version (which has turned into quite a history lesson (more for my own archival purposes))
At Lotus I’ve been working on the Activities project from the first day I started, but Activities has meant many different things over the past few years. I was originally inspired to join IBM to help work on the productization of the Activity Explorer research project (wahoo a new way to collaborate!). When I started the team was just releasing the preview of Activity Explorer in IBM Workplace.
But it wasn’t very long before momentum started moving away from Activities as a traditional rich client application toward focusing on a web experience. This was great for me since I was one of the few people on the team that already had some web development skills. The period that followed was the best programming experience I’ve had so far in my life. We (me and my tech lead) were pumping out code left and right, righting decent tests, quickly getting a prototype usable, continually responding to feedback from use, and adding features all the time.