For those of you who were at the Cinncinnati NFJS show, please continue on to the next blog entry in your reader--you've already heard this. For those of you who weren't, then allow me to make the announcement: Hi. My name's Ted Neward, and I am now a ThoughtWorker . After four months of discussions, interviews, more discussions and more interviews, I can finally say that ThoughtWorks and I have come to a meeting of the minds, and starting 3 September I will be a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks. My role there will be to consult, write, mentor, architect and speak on Java, .NET, XML Services (and maybe even a little Ruby), not to mention help ThoughtWorks' clients achieve IT success in other general ways. Yep, I'm basically doing the same thing I've been doing for the last five years. Except now I'm doing it with a TW logo attached to my name. By the way, ThoughtWorkers get to choose their own titles, and I'm curious to know what readers think my title should be. Send me your suggestions, and if one really strikes home, I'll use it and update this entry to reflect the choice. I have a few ideas, but I'm finding that other people can be vastly more creative than I, and I'd love to have a title that rivals Neal's "Meme Wrangler" in coolness. Oh, and for those of you who were thinking this, "Seat Warmer" has already been taken, from what I understand. Honestly, this is a connection that's been hovering at the forefront of my mind for several years. I like ThoughtWorks' focus on success, their willingness to explore new ideas (both methodologies and technologies), their commitment to the community, their corporate values, and their overall attitude of "work hard, play hard". There have definitely been people who came away from ThoughtWorks with a negative impression of the company, but they're the minority. Any company that encourages T-shirts and jeans, XBoxes in the office, and wants to promote good corporate values is a winner in my book. In short, ThoughtWorks is, in many ways, the consulting company that I would want to build, if I were going to build a consulting firm. I'm not a wild fan of the travel commitments, mind you, but I am definitely no stranger to travel, we've got some ideas about how I can stay at home a bit more, and frankly I've been champing at the bit to get injected into more agile and team projects, so it feels like a good tradeoff. Plus, I get to think about languages and platforms in a more competitive and hostile way--not that TW
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