Archive for the ‘chit chat’ Category
PicLens - News as Pictures
I’ve started using PicLens more and more these days. It’s one of those Marmite love or hate things. Either you love PicLens or you don’t. I like it because it reminds me of the News in Pictures that broadsheets publish at the end of a year. With PicLens you can do this every day.
Nice!
Computer Weekly Blog Awards
I’ll keep this short because I always feel awkward when you have to plug yourself. However, now that I’m in the race, best start running. However, I cannot run with being wound up and votes wind me up 
So, vote by following these three easy steps:
- Go to the Computer Weekly Blog Awards Site
- Select ‘The Long Way Round’ from the Programming and Technical Blogs combo box.
- Hit Submit.
That’s it. Job done. Now, back to content…
Launching Java Soup
This is just a quickie to say that I’m contributing news to another blog called Java Soup that focuses exclusively on the Java platform. I’ll still be posting here but all Java related stuff will be heading out in the Java Soup direction.
QCon 2009 - Here I Come!
I am officially a lucky son of a gun. After walking away with a Wii at the 2007 No Fluff Just Stuff conference in London, I am now the proud owner of the willie wonker free pass to QCon 2009.
The guys at InfoQ announced that they would round up all the bloggers writing posts about QCon 2008 London and randomly pick a winner. Yours truly won! I’m chuffed.
Big hand to InfoQ. Only 9 months to go…
Adequate is not good enough!
A friend of mine, nicknamed “LeToe” for his rather poor footballing skills, is MD of a global telecommunications company. Big business. In a roundabout way, we came to learn that on one of his staff improvement courses, he was caught trying to motivate an employee by chanting “adequate is not good enough”! Needless to say, whenever we see the human motivator LeToe, adequate is not good enough is always a great source of fun and the first thing we throw at him whenever we meet up. What a plonker!
Clearly adequate is not perfect but as Daniel Tenner convincingly argues, perfection does not exist. Take a look at the picture opposite. As a product company you start at A and wish to build the perfect product that you think is at B. But actually, its a C. Over the years, we have learnt that you need to involve the users both early and often. Release small. Release frequently. Keep releasing! On good days, Flickr was releasing to production every 30 minutes. No question, this certainly helps companies built better products. They inspect and adapt, veering away from the white elephant at B and more towards the holy grail at C. All good so far.
Users change. If fact, I’d argue that today you woke up a different person than you were yesterday. So over time, C is really a moving target. Only a fool would assume that users and their needs stay the same. So if you’re looking for perfection in your products, you’re pretty much going to be chasing your tail. However, if you lower your goal bar slightly and acknowledge this, what you can do is build a better product that strives to meet its users needs but without comprising itself. Oh yes, there comes a time when the product is pulled so far off track that it makes no sense its current form. You just need to know when that time is or as 37signals maintain, don’t get distracted in the first place and let your customers move on if the product no longer meets their needs.
Now, swap product for company, apply the same thinking, and you inevitably arrive at the conclusion that there is no such thing as the perfect company. Even Google are starting to realise this…
QCon 2008 : Friday
Choices, choices. Which sessions shall I attend today? Hmmm, let’s see what the schedule says. Ah I like the look of both the Architecture and Ruby tracks. Interesting. Well, both tracks were run by a host named James (Govenor & Cox). Both hosts I’ll never forget. Both of them for the wrong reasons! Please, let me explain.
A QCon day starts with a summary from the track host that highlights what goodies they have planned for us conference junkies. It’s a good idea because, when done well, you can make an informed decision about whether it would be in your interest to stick around for the track sessions. I made the snap decision to see what the Ruby track had to offer. I arrived ten minutes before the start, I always do, armed with my coffee and chatting to other attendees about their interest in Ruby. And waited. Fixed an annoying iChat problem on my Mac. And waited. Still, no sign of Jame Cox the Ruby track host. And Waited. At 09:10, with no sign of the track host, I started to pack my things away and head out. If he can’t be bothered, I’m not interested. James saunters in, all smiles and giggles, bantering with other track presenters, whilst all the conference attendees look around slightly bemused. After a few more minutes of idle and in joke banter with the other track presenters, they finally realise that the track host has not delivered his summary. Am I being petty, probably, so I’ll rephrase.
The track host had not informed the conference attendees what was in store for them on the Ruby track.
Whatever! James shrugs it off and moves on to introduce the first speaker. I hear grumbles from adjacent attendees. Arrogance, bad planning, don’t care attitude, I couldn’t place it. For me, it was a clear display of, my time is more important than yours. Miffed and totally uninformed about the ruby qcon offering, I left. A couple more attendees left as well. Not good. Not clever.
I made a mad dash over to the Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About hosted by James Govenor. I was just in time to catch the last part of a chin posing session. Yes, you heard me right, chin posing. There I was, hot and bothered, messed about by those Ruby guys and being asked to chin pose. Not once, but several times. Now I’m not a grumpy person, but I paid to be at QCon. What’s happening QCon? Where’s the content? Am I in some fracing QCon parallel universe run by chin-posing Cylons? Where’s your pocket life saber when you need it?
Enter Randy Shoup of Ebay, the first presenter in the Architectures track. By damn, a welcome save. I had heard snippets of his thoughts at the panel on performance and scalability yesterday. However, we were treated to a full hour of the problems faced and solutions adopted to rollout out Ebay. A great talk by someone clearly very knowledgeable in the delivery of highly scalable and highly available systems. I managed to corner him for 15 mins and pick his brains around how Ebay manage their rollout processes and environments, given that it is not economically viable for them to mimic their production environment.
Unfortunately, Randy’s was the best talk, so it was downhill from there on this track. BBC did a talk about there architecture that was interesting for me because I have an interested in CMS-based architectures, Market Risk at BNP Paribas was good as well, salesforce was okay but didn’t float my boat and mySpace was not really a talk on architecture but more hacking around in the darkest areas of the .NET platform. Time for a change. So I decided to head back to the Ruby track and listen to what a panel of Ruby experts had to say about the language and Rails the web framework.
The panel consisted of Ola Bini of JRuby, David Chelminsky and Aslak Hellesoy of rSpec, Nic Williams and moderated by James Cox. I’ve never met Ola and was the first time I had heard him talk. I like they way he listens to questions and presents answers. He actually cares. David and Aslak from rSpec also gave good answers. Nic Williams I thought, excuse the pun, derailed the panel discussion. Everything had to be joke. Right back at you. I’m clever. Look at how funny I am. It got really boring, really quickly. I was there for answers, not lip. I don’t think I’ll ever attend a Nic Williams talk if this is the way he presents. Don’t get me wrong, I like jokes. But comedy is all in the timing. As a result, I got nothing positive from this panel and it re-enforced general view of Rubyists as childish, myopic, clever coders. After the panel, as I was walking down the stairs with other people that had just attended that panel discussion, the general consensus was a negative feeling towards the Ruby community. This is a shame because I love Ruby but that track did not make many new friends, particularly with the business folk in the audience that were looking at ways in which it could be adopted within their organisations. Anyway, enough said on that.
The conference was wrapped up with a panel of experts that spoke about their take-away points from the conference. And that was that.
Will I go to QCon next year? Definitely. A top conference that on the whole put you in the room with some really interesting people. Good stuff…
QCon 2008 : Thursday
Lazy me! I set a task to write up my three days at QCon within a week of the conference finishing. Yep, you guessed it, I’m not done. In fact, the InfoQ boys have already posted their conference takeaway summary. Never mind, here is my take on Thursday @ QCon.
I really enjoyed it. The keynote from Kent Beck was delivered in typical Beck fashion. Simple slides. Deep messages. Context dependency humour. You ain’t gonna get that from the slideware, but there it is.
Spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon in the Performance and Scalability Solution Track. I loved this track. It was good to have access to architects and engineers that as part of their day-to-day job deal with issues of scale that everyday developers only every read about. It was interesting to see the common understanding amongst these guys around scalability. The knowing looks they shared when they spoke about when database-centric architectures hit the scale limits. The typical things you need to do to approach linear scalability within your own systems. CAP Theorem. Amadhl’s Law. Clustered architectures. And so on.
And then, without a shadow of a doubt, the best individual talk of the conference was Kent Beck’s Effective Design. Kent broke down into very simple terms the thought processes he goes through during design and very kindly played them back to us in this talk. It was one of those talks, as someone said at the conference, that you left the room feeling dumber and that you had some serious reading to catch up on. I’m glad I never missed that.
And finally, I attended a talk by Jim Webber on Web Services, REST and MEST. More on Jim’s REST stuff can be found on the ThoughWorks podcasts. Also, I entered into a number of conversations and listened to speakers saying that there is definitely a shift in emphasis from web services to REST-based solutions. I am pleased about this and hope I don’t ever have to delve into the WS-* (read as deathstar). I’ve committed too much of my life to WSDL.
Anyway, that’s thursday done. A great day, leaving just Friday to write up.