#MeetOurTeam – James

What does a typical workday look like for you?

Normally, I check email, etc at home before the kids get up, inevitably get beaten at Wordle by my sister in the UK, and often go to the office.  I attend a bunch of project status meetings, line-management activities, and often broader strategy discussions.  I always try and grab lunch in the canteen with the rest of the team and in the afternoons I try and keep most of my time freer to attack project work, which is not often that technical these days.  Most office days I leave early to get the car back home for my wife and then finish off the day’s work before spending what is sometimes quality time with my kids!

Which technologies do you work with?

.Net (mostly Core v6+ and a little Framework 4.8), our gitops stack of Terraform, FluxCD, and Kubernetes, and a bunch of Python. 
Our desktop and backend technologies are mostly .Net (Core v6/7/8 and a little Framework 4.8) and some Go, and our frontend technologies are Angular and increasingly .Net Blazor.  Our CI/CD pipelines are hosted in Azure DevOps and our gitops stack uses Terraform, FluxCD, and Kubernetes (Azure AKS).   We develop Python products for our customers so we also naturally write a lot of Python (currently 3.11 - we try to hold off on the latest-and-greatest versions to minimize dependency problems) and interface between our systems using gRPC.  And I must not forget to mention our core technology of Yaml.  So very much Yaml!

Which systems are important for you and Cegal to achieve success?

Communications systems!  Developing and delivering software projects and products is rarely a huge leap into the technological unknown - the challenge is to develop the *right* software and deliver it to the stakeholders' expectations. That means continual alignment of long- and short-term goals between all the stakeholders and the timely and accurate recording of requirements and specifications.  
Office365 tools together with Azure DevOps are our workhorses.  But a culture made up solely of .xls files and DevOps User Stories would be an anemic culture - in our group we leaven this flat bread with social trips to local gapahuks to grill sausages together as well as holding frequent techtalks and similar events, both within our team and between different teams. So both our technical skills and fire-starting skills are always heading in the right direction.

Read more about Microsoft CoPilot here > 

Do you use AI in your job? How?

Oh, quite a bit.  I use ChatGPT and the Cetegra AI Chat client to research new technologies and business processes, MidJourney to generate illustrations and pictures (especially pictures of Killer Timesheet Monsters Chasing Office Workers when reminding the team to fill in their timesheets), and GitHub Copilot to help my coding productivity when I get the chance. I have been reading about and playing with new AI techniques based on the Transformer technology behind ChatGPT applied to seismic volumes, and using LLMs as Language Calculators to help analyze and integrate  different geoscience data sources. Much more mundanely I use these AI tools to reword and tidy up reports and emails, and generate document outlines to help organize my thoughts.

Read our blog: How AI and language models can change the energy industry > 

What drives you at work and in your role, what's fun?

I love to feel I make a (positive) difference, both to the company itself and to the professional development of the people in the team.

James

What is the best thing about working in Cegal?

The feeling of shared endeavour; and the food in the Oslo office.

Read more about what it's like working at Cegal >

Which app do you use the most, and why?

Emacs.  I read my mail in it, program in it, and use org-mode to organise my time 

Is there anything else fun we should know about you?

I act and direct amateur theatre productions.
I once met Queen Elisabeth II, and she insulted me - Never tell a girl at a party that you work in IT.  
However, I found out the plural of a computer mouse is ‘mouses’, and that’s the Queen’s English.