Joining Xamarin

After some 3 years working as an independent consultant I'm excited to announce that I'm joining Xamarin in October. Working as a consultant has brought me many interesting experiences and may do so again some day, but for some time I've been looking for a company with the right profile to join. I've mainly been looking for a highly skilled team building exciting stuff without too much corporate overhead, with a great vision, where I could really make an impact. Xamarin seems to fit the bill perfectly.

Xamarin Test Cloud

More specifically, I will be joining the Xamarin team in Århus responsible for the Xamarin Test Cloud - a cloud platform for BDD-style UI automation testing Android and iOS apps on actual physical devices without having to deal with the devices yourself. The mobile device market has crazy fragmentation due to the number of OS versions, screen sizes, customizations and just sheer number of different models. Nat Friedman (Xamarin CEO) gave a nice overview of the problem in the Xamarin Evolve 2013 keynote this year (video: The State of Mobile Testing) and also proceeded to give an overview to the Xamarin Test Cloud (video: Xamarin Test Cloud).

New challenges

First of all since I'm joining the Xamarin team in Århus and I live in Copenhagen, I will be spending quite a bit more time riding trains back and forth. It's important to be a part of the team and I've also planned to read up on tips for optimizing remote work - Scott Hanselman comes to mind, especially his tips on video portals.

I'm currently investigating possible office spaces in Copenhagen for my remote work - suggestions are very welcome.

Besides working remotely my new main programming environment will no longer be .NET and C# in Visual Studio, but rather Ruby in some yet undecided editor on a Mac. It's always refreshing to try something new! But while I'll be writing Ruby, Xamarin does have a heavy investment in C#, so I'm sure my C# knowledge will come in handy anyway.

Exciting times.