Welcome to the first in this series of articles relating to development environment setup. What I’m trying to do here is provide an insight to our systems and the thoughts and reasoning behind why we’ve gone that way.
We’re not a leading authority on the subject but we’re hoping in committing this to the web we’ll stimulate comments and feedback that will help us whilst also providing a resource for others trying to do the same.
This first article is going to focus more on our motivations and limitations, giving background on who we are and what we’re trying to achieve. Later articles will focus on specific items and have more of a “how-to” flavour than this. I feel its worth discussing these items first to give you an idea of where we are coming from; that should help guide you as to how much of the subsequent posts will be relevant to you.
Who Are We ? Mighty Oaks From Small Acorns Grow
My name is Simon Crozier, and I am a development manager / lead developer at HighSpeedTraining, we’re based in Leeds (Yorkshire, UK). We’re not the biggest company (less than 15 people in total), and we work on a relatively modest budget – in short we’re no IBM. We definitely consider ourselves a technology company, although we work in a market that is relatively immature in IT and development terms (e-learning).
Technology in e-learning is generally regarded as equipment and resource rather than key business and market drivers, as such much of what is considered the norm in other industries have yet to be widely adopted in e-learning. We’re a fairly young company and as such it’d be fair to say our development team is still finding its feet slightly but we’re committed to doing things Right.
Its not all bad news though !… Being a small technology company everybody in the team, including non-technical members, appreciates that the good use of technology is key to allowing us to compete with our more established competitors. Further more being a young company we’re still defining our standards and we’re flexible enough to adapt and make big changes quickly. We’re also lucky enough to have a group of developers who are enthusiastic about their roles, see themselves as craftsmen and appreciate you never know enough. No RFAs here !
In short we’re currently in a really positive position, but we think the decisions we make at this point will have a big impact on the company’s future. Collectively we’ve no interest in being good enough; we want to be as excellent as budget allows.
