Do you have a personal coffee machine at work?
It's quite late in the Seattle area now and I'm in the process of writing a first draft of a blog entry about how to misuse the code coverage. We've learned some lessons during the last year or so in Speech Server team and it's a good time for the root cause analysis. Of course it's also always easier to criticize something than do it properly yourself ;-) While analyzing our failures and successes I drink coffee to stay mentally sharp and suddenly realize that I actually need to write something about coffee.
How this old joke was: "software engineers are machines that take coffee and requirements as input and produce lines of code as output?" After having a personal coffee machine at office for last 6 months or so, I consider this being an investment which pays of very well. Generally there are two main ways to get coffee at Microsoft (I won’t talk about the option of bringing your own coffee to work):
- "Starbucks". Almost every Microsoft cafeteria has one. IMHO "Starbucks" has quite high quality and wide choice. There are a couple of problems though. Getting "Starbucks" consists of the following steps: walking to the cafeteria, standing in the line, ordering your coffee, waiting for the coffee, and walking back or taking an additional 5-10 minutes to chat with your colleagues. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against the exercise, I get plenty of that almost every day. The question for me is the time and getting back into zone.
- Community coffee machine. Algorithm is simple: if somebody has made some coffee then drink it, otherwise brew the coffee yourself. The trick with the community coffee machine is that if person A makes coffee then persons B, C, and D may not like it. It’s too strong or in most of the cases it’s too emaciated. I ran once a series of experiments where I went and tasted "community coffee" for 10 times during random days at random time. Only at 2 out of 10 times the coffee was drinkable for me, otherwise it was too weak ;-) But on the other hand, I like strong coffee so the problem is mainly on my side. Another solution here is to come to work very early and brew the first pot of coffee or intercept the moment when another pot needs to be started.
About half a year ago I purchased my own coffee machine and I have to admit that it was wise thing to do. My choices expanded significantly:
- I can brew as strong coffee as I want.
- I can brew any type of coffee I want.
- I can brew as much coffee as I want. The fellow geek next door needs a shot of caffeine, no problem at all - I can help him out.
To summarize: though I still visit the nearby cafeteria once or twice a week (mainly because of the social reasons) this experience could serve as a good material for self-help book - "Coffee machine which changed my life and increased my productivity" ;-) I also have to think what'll be the next thing to acquire? Refrigerator or microwave oven or even a cocktail shaker ;-)