January 24, 2007 - Third day of work in the Gothenborg office.

Nothing much to report, just working real hard to day. Since I don't have much to say, let me tell you why I am here. On our new devices, I am responsible for the audio portions of the next generation phone. In our previous products we've always done analog audio routing, and that was easy, because all you have to do is hook up the wires to the speaker and you are done. The drawback there is that you don't have the flexibility of being able to "mix" in different audio streams.

So, now comes the digital age, and our new products will have all their audio routined digitally, instead of being connected in analog. This means that we have a lot of flexibility in terms of what we can do with the audio, such as mixing, filtering...etc. Also, it makes it a lot easier to change since its all digital, and you just manipulate it with a few lines of code.

Anyways, so welcome to my world! This is what I have been doing for a living. Because the audio portion of this new phone is sooo huge, we have some contractors that does about 90% of the coding, and I currently do about 10% of the coding and 90% of project management. As our contractors starts to roll off their contract (we'll be down to 3 contractors from 15 pretty soon), I will have to take over.

Thus, I am here - to push them along, to learn from them what they do, to ask them to clarify to me what they have done, and most importantly, to put a face to all the names that I see.

Before I came on this trip, it was hard working with our counterparts in Sweden - everytime something breaks, we blame them - and then when there are delays, they blame us for not giving them clear directions. I used to think that they are just contractors, and that they get paid for doing what we tell them to do (which is why I think that contracting sucks). Worst of all, non of them really cared about our project as a whole.

As it turns out, we have one of the nicest and best groups of contractors that I had ever worked with out here. They are sincere, and works really hard. And now that I can put a face to all the names, it definitely makes working with them a lot easier and more fun. So far, it has been a great trip, and well worth all the money that the company spent on me coming out here!

john