Six – EpiServer

It was half past five in the afternoon.  I was sat in a Sushi bar in South Kensington after spending the day manning an exhibit at the Natural History Museum.  I opened my phone, then the Meetup app, and looked down at the calendar.  It decided that I was going to an EpiServer Meetup hosted in a company in Farringdon.  Two tube trains later, I arrived at the entrance, buzzed an entrance buzzer and climbed a flight of stairs.  A chap called Dave offered me a cheery hello, a handshake and told me to grab a beer.

Like in all good parties everyone had congregated in the kitchen.  I guessed there were about fifty or sixty people, all chatting away.  I grabbed a beer from one of the two huge buckets of ice that were sitting perched on a table.  The bucket was surrounded by a thoughtful mixture of tasty salty snacks.  I was liking this event!  It had a positive buzz to it.  It was certainly very well organised, whatever it was about.

‘Good choice!’ I said to a chap who was standing on his own, looking a little uncomfortable.  I motioned to the brand of beer he had chosen.  My new friend was an Irish chap called Trevor. 

‘Are you an EpiServer developer?’ he asked.

‘I used to be a developer, but not an EpiServer developer.  I’m just here, you know, to find out about new developments in technology’ I explained, which had an element of truth about it.  I chastised myself yet again; Trevor struck me as the kind of guy who might have appreciated the random reason of why I was there.  Trevor, it transpired, was hoping to speak to someone about a project he was involved with.

‘These guys are from the parliament’ Trevor gestured to a small group who obviously knew each other well.

‘What, the UK parliament?’ I asked stupidly, not really taking in what he said.

Within fifteen minutes the mist of confusion started to clear.  All the fifty or so people in the room were at a bi-annual meeting to share information about enhancements to a software product that could be used to manage and deploy large websites for commercial companies.  By large websites, we’re talking about sites that are run by huge multi-national companies.  We’re talking about big stuff; massive consumer electronics conglomerates, airlines and governments.  I had no idea what I was going learn, but I hoped it was going to be interesting.

The Meetup consisted of a couple of technical presentations.  A chap called Lee kicked off with the first presentation.  Lee came from the American office and talked about a new ‘commerce’ bit that had been added to the new release.  Unexpectedly, I had a vague idea about what he was talking about.  Lee projected computer code onto a big screen with a data projector and did stuff with his computer.  He talked about software interfaces and architectures.  He was giving us a show and tell.

The second talk was by a Scandinavian gentleman whose delivery style was profoundly uninspiring. He talked us all through their software testing paradigm and the code release strategy.  Since I wasn’t working with the product and couldn’t really appreciate the challenges of ‘cutting code’ and working with architectures, I found his talk extraordinarily mind boggingly tedious.

As I sat in the back of what was a very sterile room, my mind began to wander.  I looked around.  The office was devoid of any character or substantial evidence of productive work.  In a software shop I would expect a couple of walls plastered with post it notes and scribbles, acting as ‘information radiators’ for developers who grapple with problems that have been rendered real through sketches and pictures.

As I started to wonder about the culture of the EpiServer company, another thought came to mind.  Listening to these talks made me realise what I didn’t want to do: I didn’t want to be a software developer.  I felt that I still wanted to work in tech, but I wanted to do something different; I didn’t want to spend my days sitting in front of a computer, even though I once enjoyed the challenge of gaining mastery over problems and machines.  This was a revelation that was disconcerting; I had, more or less, dedicated my life to learning about computers and computer programming.  This was a reflection that I had changed, and this EpiServer event was helping me to realise this.

I decided to have another beer.

After a couple of hours, it was time to head off home.  I enjoyed my journey home.  I caught a train from Farringdon.  The station had been thoroughly remodelled since I had last been there.  It was now flash and modern; it was a glass and steel construction and it was unrecognisable from how it used to be.  As my train edged its way south, there was another surprise in store: Blackfriars station.  This too had changed.  Blackfriars has a platform that crosses the river Thames.  As I sat on the train, I had a spectacular view of the city.  I could see the Thames, St Paul’s cathedral and a forest of high rise buildings.  I caught a glimpse of The Gherkin and the new cheese grater; a veritable sandwich of a skyline.  My final stop of the first leg of my journey home was London Bridge which was being reconstructed; another reminder about how my city continues to change.