Announcement

When I am excited about something I sometimes flap my hands a little.  The excitement kind of radiates out of me in all directions.  I’m pretty excited right now. Let me explain why.

TL;DR I am delighted to announce that I will be joining Cucumber Ltd as a Director and joint owner.

After several years of helping other teams and organisations to succeed in making software products, I have recently been exploring how it feels to be making an actual product again. Needless to say, I’m loving it.

Making bread at the Cucumber retreat

One very memorable stop on my ‘coding tour’ was with the team at Cucumber last November. I have known some of the Cucumber folk for many years, mainly via the XP community. Working with them we have found there to be a sort of synergy. After the initial two days we were all kind of hooked.

Their focus on nurturing and supporting effective, human collaboration in the industry and their passion for experimentation is both impressive and refreshing. Here was an organization really living the values that I believe in.

In addition, inclusivity turns out to be one of the surprising side effects of the way that they work (mobbing remotely), and my brain, approach, experience, background, and let’s face it even gender, bring many new questions and fresh ideas. Rather than “working around” me, the team values my uniqueness and we are learning together how to build a more inclusive and diverse organisation.  For example, when I am on the mob, I appreciate their patience with my lack of knowledge and they appreciate my “beginner’s mind” taking a fresh look at the code base and highlighting areas ripe for refactoring.

I’m also proud to be making a tool (Cucumber Pro) that is helping to connect “business folk” and developers by making their work more visible to each other.

So if you ask me what I am working on right now next time we meet, don’t be surprised if I smile from ear to ear and flap my arms a little bit.

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