Kerry Buckley What’s the simplest thing that could possibly go wrong?

It looks like Paul Karsten has succeeded in making the case for more developers: Paul, Alkesh and I are now part of the Web21C SDK team (they assure us there’s plenty of Java as well as .net, and if we’re really good they might even let us play with Ruby).

This is good news on several fronts – Paul’s team seems to be one of the few remaining places in the company where in-house developers are still valued, they’re as keen all things XP and agile as we are, and as far as I know this is the first time anyone’s succeeded in moving an established team to a new project en masse since the new ‘resource management’ strategy was introduced.

Marc McNeill makes some interesting observations on how you can judge a company by the coffee facilities it provides its employees. He lists, in order of decreasing clue:

1. Vending machine that serves [quality] coffee on free vend.
2. Kettle and filter coffee / Cafetiere to make my own.
3. Kettle. I buy my own instant coffee.
4. Vending machine that serves [quality] coffee that I have to pay for.
5. Vending machine that serves [tasteless] cofee that I insert coins into.
6. Vending machine that serves [tasteless] coffee that I insert a vending card into.

Where I work, we have a choice of options three or six. We also have another, that slots in one side or the other of number four:

• Coffee bar that serves [quality[ish]] coffee that I have to pay [through the nose] for.

At the training centre where I’ll be on Wednesday (formerly a BT site, now run by Accenture), they’ve managed to find another option, which I guess ranks (and having tasted the coffee, I choose the word rank advisedly) at around 4.5:

• Vending machine that serves [tasteless] coffee on free vend.