So here’s the travelling side you can experience through working for Solutions. My weekly commute included a flight to Oslo on Monday and back Thursday. My base while out of town was a hotel in the city where the reception staff recognised me enough to give me upgrades.

Often I would stay late at work and get a takeaway with others at the office, quite a nice selection I would recommend Spice.no. When I escaped early I would sample the many restaurants in Oslo armed with a book so I didn’t get bored eating alone. I didn’t always eat alone though, my Norwegian manager and some team mates would often go out together, I wasn’t abandoned!

On top of the advantage of eating out, and not having to cook, I could go to the hotel gym and pool with a relaxing sauna to finish off my day. One evening I also managed to squeeze in some night-time skiing. To have a break in routine I was allowed to fly out a friend one weekend to Oslo instead of flying back myself so I got to enjoy the City by day as well as by night.

During this 6-month period in Oslo we had a pretty hectic workload:
Install the new system
Provide integration with existing development tools
Switch users over to the new system
Carry out training for the new process

Training was especially fun given the different languages. The majority of course spoke fluent English but in general anything requiring detail needs a Norwegian translation. Therefore I often provided the information to the team and my Norwegian colleagues would carry out the training sessions while I waited for the questions.

All in all we got everything running and development progressed with our new system. This included the introduction of an in house product to maintain builds and deployments of code to development and test environments. With this tool we have increased turn around for getting code to environments to testing reducing environment outages.

This leads us onto the support stage so I stopped the weekly Oslo commute, remote access was setup for the UK and we built up a team based out of the London Delivery Centre to provide a continued service…