It may be a bit of a “no duh” observation to point out that joining a consulting firm has a very different work flow versus working in corporate. A few numbers: Number of days when pairing occurred: 5 Number of hours spent pairing: ~37 Number of stand-ups: 5 Time spent in stand ups (week): ~ 50 minutes Brown Bag Lunch: 90 minutes Emails received within project team: 3 Emails received from client: 1 Skills Worked On: HTML5, CSS3, Rails, Backbone.JS Times astounded by my pair’s refactoring skills: 2

I recently signed up to take an Algorithms class online via Coursera. The language of the class is the new lingua franca, Java. I do most of my development on a VPS which means I’m accustomed to doing my work on the command line with my editor being Vim. While the class doesn’t require one to use an IDE, I didn’t see that any other work flows explained how to do the assignments without an IDE. I’ve done some work around Java build management using Maven, so I thought I would try to apply Maven’s basics so that I could do my work on my VPS.