The company that I’m working for at present is in the process not just of designing their latest product, but of moving offices. A small advance party has been sorting out arrangements at our new location over the past few weeks, and, on Friday, our team became the first group to take up permanent residence.
This is how the new place looks. Somewhere in that photo, there are eight developers hard at work [clue: the kitchen, containing the coffee machine, is just out of shot on the left].
It was kind of weird having the whole place to ourselves for now. I guess that will change soon enough, as the rest of the company ships across over the next month.
The open-plan layout represents a stark contrast to the previous location, which was rather warren-like in character. It’s nice – I like it. The only thing that had me slightly perturbed was that, despite only being a couple of miles from the old place, my satnav decided to get creative when I left for the evening, and took me home via an entirely different route to the one it recommended from the old place, involving lots of unfamiliar local roads. It turned out to be a very fast route indeed, but it did make me wonder, as I belted along in the dark, about the mathematical implications of the common algorithms used by satnav devices in selecting the ‘best route’ from A to B that could result in such radically different conclusions when A moves by just 2 miles. I think that must mean I’m a software developer at heart. :)
