Today, February 5th, 2008, is my first day as a Terracotta developer.

I intend to blog about both Terracotta and my progress as a developer. So far two ideas I have is to maintain a separate account of my transition from a PC to a MacBook Pro, and to document a checklist for new TC developers.

Terracotta developers are currently given the choice of windows, Mac OS or Linux. As I said, I’ve chosen a MacBook Pro as my computer. Mostly this is because my friend and boss Alex is already using one. It’s also because I wanted to try something other than windows, which is the only OS I’ve used professionally.

As you might expect, this first day was mostly about setting up my computer. Alex and I did talk about what I would work on first, which is the distributed testing framework that is in development and a set of test use cases centered around Terracotta’s distributed cache functionality. These use cases are based on a number of real world use cases. I’m particularly excited about one aspect of this in-house test framework, which is that the tests are scripted using Groovy.

I’ll be working from home, which is also another first. Frequently I’ll be working at Alex’s home, as I did this morning. This was a surreal but enjoyable experience and I’m looking forward to it. Last Friday was my last day of my 1.5 year stint as a contractor at Monsanto, so it was quite a contrast to go from that business casual environment to sitting on a folding chair in Alex’s basement with my shoes off.

Alex capped off my first morning nicely by treating me to lunch at Penn Station.