Today was my first day at ABB Grain Ltd. Carl (my manager) gave me a tour of the facilities where apparently 400 staff are based. I was impressed to learn that not only is tea and coffee provided, but there's even an on-site gym.

The location is very pleasant, overlooking the parklands. Veale Gardens is directly across the road, which is a nice place to walk around at lunch time. The office is reasonable quiet (yay, no loud conversations from people supporting video conferences! Some people will know who I'm talking about!)

I'm starting to learn a bit more about the application that I'll be working on. Timothy Walters has had a couple of weeks head start on me, but with the combination of C#, WPF, SQL 2005, NHibernate, ActiveRecord and CAB (and maybe the possibility of Castle Windsor), this is going to be really interesting.

Timothy also mentioned he's keen to do some pair programming on this project. Looks like we're going to get to do a bit of extreme programming.

Other good news is my computer did have dual monitors (though hopefully one will be replaced as I had trouble connecting with a funny DVI plug). They're also using IP telephony, which is cool. Unfortunately their SIP server is not public, so no free calls from home though :-(

Instead of TFS, they use OnTime for bug tracking and CVS for version control (though we might be moving to Subversion).

So all in all a pretty good first day, and I'm feeling excited about the project work (even if I did discover the database has no foreign keys at all - aargh!)