Tag: conference

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Development

XP2010

So last week I was lucky enough to attend XP2010 in Trondheim. It was an intense week with great people and great content. It’s kind of hard to process all this content, but it’s time to try.

After listening to the excellent advice of Ole Christian I attended the workshop of Chris Matts on Feature Injection . It was absolutely one of my best sessions at XP2010 and it turned out to be really relevant to what I’m doing at my current client. I think I’ll be able to use a lot of this when it comes to working with the requirements and really understanding what matters.

After an intense workshop it’s always good to listen to Mary Poppendieck talk about Lean in a nutshell . I’ve heard or read a lot of her stuff before, but she has a really unique way of explaining and selling her point of view. I always learn a lot from listening to her.

Ole Ellnestam and Daniel Brolund rounded off the day in a nice way with Mikado refactoring . It’s an interesting and structured way of doing large refactorings. I’ve done something similar with rolling back changes when I get stuck, but this is a nice structured way to approach it. Now if only my computer hadn’t been acting up I would actually be able to practice it a bit more.

The second day started out with a bang, first with a keynote by Scott Page, then listening to Cory Foy talk about craftsmanship. Head over to the program page of XP2010 to see the videos. It’s really worth the time. While you’re there also check out the talks by Mary Poppendieck and Marcus Ahnve.

Now I must admit that most of thursday was lost to my nerves, as I was holding two lightning talks that day. Of the ones I saw and really liked was the talk of Jonas Follesø about the Blackbox Recorder . This sparked quite an interest in the Java crowd, so some started the Java version: Jackbox Recorder . Sadly one of my talks was at the same time as the My Agile Suitcase Pecha Kucha, so I didn’t get to see it. I heard great things about it. Luckily there’s video out.

On the last day, conference fatigue were setting in. But I got a great session of Coding Katas. Interesting to both see other languages and other people code. I really also liked the workshop Cory Foy gave on innovation games. It opened my eyes on how to do facilitation around requirements and features, and tied quite nicely into the stuff from the first day with Feature Injection.

Well, this is just a try at writing down what I remember and process some of the information. I know it’s summary, just let me know if there’s something I should expand ont.

It was really a great conference, like none I’ve attended before. Thank you to all the brilliant people that I met and the organizers.

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Development

JavaZone 2009 over

So the big event for Java geeks in Oslo, JavaZone, is over. I had a blast as always, and a little less people. Moving the overflow area helped a lot. The less people was a conscious choice I’ve been told, and I wouldn’t really mind even fewer. But hey, I guess there’s some economics that has to work too.

My company, Capgemini was present as usual, and the bright girls and guys did an excellent job of tweeting and blogging from the conference. If you know norwegian check out our twitter stream and the technology blog.

We also had two full feature talks, and I was really satisfied with how they went. Always something to change, but over all very satisfied. The topics were (sorry only Norwegian slides):

  • Smidig Utrulling (Agile deployment) – Slides
  • Rules engine vs. Domain logic – Slides

For the Smidig Utrulling talk I spent a lot of time creating code and examples. They contain some simplified Maven setup and a Java program to do deployment from the Maven repo. Check it out at http://github.com/anderssv/agile-deploy/tree/master . Documentation is scarce as always, but let me know if I can make something better. And feel free to use.

The videos will be available later, but if you want to see the ones that are available (of others, some english speakers) you can check them out at http://tcs.java.no . Tandberg delivered the video equipment and it seems like they are doing a hell of a job for the community. Check out the videos, there’s a lot of good talks there.

Now for some vacation, see you. 🙂

Categories
Development

JavaZone 2008 is over

So JavaZone 2008 is over. Had a blast, and saw lots of cool stuff. It was a bit crowded some times, and a bit too many talks was full, but all in all good. Just a short summary for on the good stuff:

  • Heidi Arnesen Austlid on Open Source in the public sector – The government in Norway has a strong preference for Open Source. The motivation for this is to reduce costs, enable exchange of information through open standards and take back control of their it-systems.
  • Rickard Öberg on Qi4J – A good introduction to the component oriented stuff Qi4J is built upon. Everything i compiled by the Java compiler, and everything is refactorable. Really nice stuff, that will be extremely interesting once it matures.
  • Mary Poppendieck on the Double Paradox of Lean Software Development – Mary is always interesting. Utilisation is not the thing to strive for, throughput is. In fact if you maximise utilisation for the expected you have no capacity to handle the unexpected and performance will suffer severely when the unexpected occurs.
  • Robert C. Martin on functions for Clean Code – Uncle Bob is also one of those really good speakers that are always entertaining. A good talk on the basics of function design and how to make this readable and maintainable. Most of us has a lot to learn about pretty basic things, and that a lot of this basic training in good programming (often good OO) is ignored in our education.

Reviewing the program I now see that I have missed more good talks than I really wanted. A mix of bad planning, beer and walking around meeting people will have to take the blame. 😉 I hope they publish most talks as videos later on.

Great conference, see you next year. 🙂