It’s hot outside. It’s even hotter inside my apartment where the air is not moving at all, even if all the windows are open. During the day the sun heats up the brick walls of the apartment building I live in and the it doesn’t really cool down until some time in the middle of the night.

But I’m not here to talk to you about the heat, you all probably know what it feels like when it’s 30 degrees Celsius outside. I’m writing this to tell you all about an interesting change in my life: I’m heading back to the rat race for real.

For a few months now I’ve been working half time-ish for my previous employer. The hours and the money were both good, but we all knew it was only temporary. There was a reason why I quit in the first place, and to be honest that reason is just as valid today as it was half a year ago.

So on Monday August 17 I’m having my first day at the company where I started my computer science career back in 2003, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, or NRK as we like to call it in the land where polar bears are roaming the streets during winter.

I’ll be part of the team working on their web publishing platform. I can only imagine that it’s a behemoth of a system and I’m looking forward to diving down into documentation, APIs, diagrams and whatnot. The system I’ve been a part of developing for the last 5 years has also been quite large and complicated, but it’s different when you’ve been there since the first line of code was written. Now I’ll have to tackle a code base that I’m assuming is quite large already. I will also have to get used to frame works and development methods I’m familiar with, but don’t necessarily use too often.

There are a lot of things that makes NRK a very attractive place to work for me. One thing is that they managed to convince me that they have good methods for project planning, development, testing and deployment. All this are important to be able to have a work day that is at least semi-predictable and a job where you actually leave your tasks at work when you go home. Of course I realize that there will be times when things you didn’t predict happen, and I’ll need to work a little extra, but as long as it’s not every single day, I’m fine.

One of the most interesting things about this new job is that Hallvard will be my boss. Even though he will not tell me what to do on a day-to-day basis, he will the one who has to fire me if I fuck up. And if you try to browse nrk.no after August 17 and you see nothing, I’m probably the one to blame.