Chicago Trip
In February my supervisor offered me the opportunity to go to Chicago with him for a week. The intent was to interface with Slalom, the company Nautilus had contracted to create the Max Intelligence Platform (MIP). As a former Army officer I understood the value of a proper right-seat/left-seat ride. Since I would be taking over MIP development next, I jumped at the learning opportunity. For the non-soldiers among us, a left-seat/right-seat is the practice of having the incoming unit for a rotation sitting on the left (the passengers seat) for the first week while the veteran drives. For the second week the veteran and the new guy switch places and the new guy drives while the veteran observes and occasionally offers suggestions based on their experience. At the end of the second week the veteran goes home and the new guy assumes full responsibility for this area of operations. It’s a practice that’s carried the United States Army through two decades of warfare and is in general a good practice to implement where possible.
The Slalom team has varied in size over the past 12 months of their work on the project. At their height they had ~15 developers working simultaneously. Their current transition force of 5 developers are the core of the team and they were who we met in Chicago. Over the course of the week we addressed their Android and iOS architecture paradigms, their back-end services, as well as their Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CICD) pipelines. I learned a lot while there and became pretty confident in assuming the reigns, at least as Nautilus' lead mobile developer.
In the teams' facilities, I finally got to see what the stereotypical software company flush with cash looks like. Slalom occupied no fewer than two full floors in a downtown Chicago high-rise. Each floor had it’s own “kegerator” with three different beers on tap. I later learned that the office consumed five kegs a week to keep their developers happy and productive. They also had Foosball tables, ping-pong tables, a secret video game room, and a wall full of nerf guns that they only half-jokingly referred to as “the armory”. After almost three years of working for scrappy startups, shoe-string freelance companies, and conservative mega-corporations, it was eye opening to finally see how the other half lives.
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