My brain was really challenged last night at the London Clojurians super special dojo event. The challenge for the evening was the really hard 4Clojure problems and they certainly were a challenge.

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Thousands of developers flocked to Devoxx again this year and everyone I talked to really enjoyed the wide range of talk and the comfy chairs in the venue.

Its hard to do justice to the experience in a blog post, so here are highlights of my favourite Devoxx speakers

Dick Wall and the Java Posse

Have these guys reached legendary status yet? For a number of reasons I think they should - just for being out there and getting people motivated they deserve a medal (or just lots of free beer from Atlassian).

Dick Wall followed up with what seemed to be top attended session of the conference. He talked about slaying legends (ironic considering my last statement) and encouraging people to think for themselves - I know, radical stuff!

The diabolical developer also made an appearance with Trisha Gee and the Java Duchess crew speaking on how not to treat women in IT.

pawelwrzeszcz Trisha’s Ramblings: Why We Shouldn’t Target Women - really good summary of the discussion panel at @devoxx

Kevin Nilson and Stephen Chin pair presenting on JavaFX and HTML5

Its always a great learning experience when developers pair, so pairing to give a session always gives you that extra dimention. Watching these two present was fascinating and fun!

The guys gave honest and open comparison of JavaFX which most people thought was dead but seems alive and well and HTML - humour was about and no ego was on display.

Alex Miller @PureDanger

Alex did a great job druming up even more interest in Clojure and gave some facinting insights into the language. His first talk was aimed at getting people started with Clojure and I was great to see different ways of getting Clojure concepts across. I am doing a quick refactor of my Clojure talk for the LJC conference this weekend.

@devstonez Stream Execution with Clojure and Fork/Join slides - #clojure #fp #jvm #devoxx @puredanger

Unfortunatley we didnt get chance to pair up and do some Clojure coding together, too many great conversations got in the way.

Justin Septka - Atlassian

Justin gave a great talk on DVCS and understanding how to get the most out of Git in your own teams. Git is relatively new to most teams and using services like Bitbucket and Github can give developers a lot of power to manage their code effectively.

Lots of advice was given out on how to manage your repos and how to use pull requests to manage feature branching and other aspects of continuous deliver & deployment. Its worth checking out the video on Parleys if you want to know more.

Its great to see speakers getting feedback and there was a huge queue of people lined up to speak to Justin afterwards.

Thank you

Adaptavist guys fired up some Microsoft Kinect love on all the big tv’s outside the talk theatres. Dan Hardiker went above and beyond the call of duty and dressed up as a very large Java Duke for the afterparty. He seems is a good dancer when dressed up!

Thanks to Stephan and everyone else (too numerous to mention) that help put Devoxx together. I am really looking forward to the next one, whether that be in France or Brazil?

houdini68 Thanks to Stephan and to all the people who turned #devoxx into a success !!! One week in paradise ! See you next year !

odersky: Slides from my talk at #devoxx slidesha.re/rtcEJL

TomaszDziurko: I’ve just posted my relation from #Devoxx 2011 on my blog - bit.ly/sF79hm

planetsizebrain apparently a running joke at #devoxx 2011: Q: What’s the difference between Ant and Maven? A: The creator of Ant has apologized.”

jthoenes: Devoxx 2011 - I’ve been in Paradise » Johannes Thönes

devstonez: JavaCodeGeeks Devoxx 2011 Impressions

Thank you.
jr0cket

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CITCon is the most intense event I know on the subject continuous integration, continuous deployment / delivery and DevOps. Discussion raged on throughout the day although we manage to keep it to minor scuffles when talking about feature branching…

With so many ideas to process after the event, here are my top 7 to start with.

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JAX London is over for another year and many of the community developers I know are suffering withdrawal symptoms from such an intense few days. With two days of talks and a whole day of workshops my head is bursting with new ideas.

I met lots of interesting new people from all over the place, asked some challenging questions of some great speakers and community leaders, got some great books and a couple of JAX London tshirts for my collection

Going Mobile

Ted Neward gave me a great kick-start to Android development and pairing with the diabolical developer helped cement my understanding. He was not so diabolical after all, maybe its just an act !

Software development is rarely straight forward, but with a couple of downloads from the Android developer site and a USB cable from my Ubuntu laptop to my Samsung Galaxy II Android phone I was soon testing out my first app.

The android development tools are really easy to use and do all the build and deploy work for you. The only issue I got stuck on was having an android virtual device and real device (my phone) up and running at the same time. Using an Android virtual device (AVD) you can have your own test platform, its one way to see the latest Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android.

Java is dead! Java is the new COBOL!

Like every technology pronounced dead, the Java platform lives on and is stronger than ever. From the keynote by James Governor, analyst at RedMonk, the respect and value of the Java platform remains alive and well across the industry. It very valuable to get objective feedback from an analysts who understands how the world sees us.

A comment on twitter suggested Java is the new COBOL, which seemed to go against the positive outlook the industry has on Java. However when you consider that COBOL has a huge codebase and drives value to a vast amout of organisation in the world then that is a comparison I can appreciate. I am not sure that was the meaning of the original post though :)

Software Craftsmanship

Sandro Mancuso treated us to some valuable lessons on the reality of software development. I dont know of any teams which have avoided a degree of technical debt, the lucky ones having a well understood and decreasing level. If you value your career, job satisfaction and sanity then software craftsmen practices are invaluable.

Jason Gorman also pitched in with a reminder of all the project evidence that showed that quick and dirty is really “slow and dirty”. Without an appreciation for quality in your code, the quick and dirty approach will bite you in the arse much sooner than you thought!

Continuous deployment - a bridge too far?

If you want to see how effective your organisation really is, then attempting to move towards a continuous development approach will give you all the information you wanted - and a whole heap more that you didnt!

When something as simple to prevent as a full hard drive can cause your company share price to fall then you know there are lots of issues to manage when you create and deploy your own software. By visualising all these issues using wallboards and openly showing the issues within and across roles, you get the opportunity to improve the way you get things done. I learnt a great deal by giving a talk on this topic and am thankful for all the poignant questions I received from the audience.

See the Ultimate Wallboard submissions for over 80 ideas on how to visualise your work.

Networking

We are all busy people so the great think about JAX London is the opportunity to talk to some many people in one place, whilst they are way from project deadlines. Its a great opportunity to ask questions and learn unexpected things. Thanks to everyone I talked to, especially my colleagues in the London Java Community.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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26th October saw the first user group meeting for Atlassian in London. Whilst there have been some amazing partner events in the past, its great to start building a closer connection to the community.

Over 60 people registered for our first meeting and it was a great turnout, from beginners to long standing customers with a variety of expertise.

Launch night - ideas mean tshirts

As it also happened to by the at the same time at the Atlassian launch there were extra goodies to give out. To help break the ice, anyone suggesting ideas for the community got a tshirt with the cool new Atlassian logo.

Whether it was the tshirts or just the enthusiasm of the crowd I dont know, but with in about 20 minutes we had enough ideas to last a years worth of monthly meetings…

I showed off a neat video that explains the basics of Atlassian OnDemand, showing how you can get our tools as a managed service. As there was a mixed level of experience, I also talked through how Atlassian take ideas through to reality.

Sharing experiences

As well as setting up the London AUG, Alan also presented his experience with the recently release Rapid board of Greenhopper. Alan has worked with teams that often have a big backlog and lots of epics (functionality that needs to be broken down). Using labels on JIRA tickets, a bit of simple JIRA Query Language (JQL) and the rapid board view he showed us how to manage our work effectively.

Whats next?

We hope to run the London Atlassian user group once a month to give every opportunity to share and ask questions face to face. We will also make use of the meetup mailing lists and discussion forums so people can talk outside the meetups.

If you want to keep in touch with this community, please sign up, its free !

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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November is going to be an amazing (and exhausting) time as I am speaking, running workshops and providing Atlassian sponsored fun at the following events:

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Ubuntu 11.10 is released on Thursday and we are running an install party in the Central London. The party aims to help people try-out and work with the Ubuntu Linux distribution and anything mildly related.

The party will be held on 16th October, 12 noon till around 5pm and will include installing Ubuntu Linux, discussing everyone’s favourite applications and generally how to have more fun and still be productive.

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At Atlassian we like to engage with people in the community and give them what they want - free stuff, great software and great events. Atlassian are therefore hosting a free community night at JAX London on Tuesday 1st November, with lots of free beer, t-shirts and special guest star Adam Bien.

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A man is in a hot air balloon and he realizes he is lost. He spots a man in the field below him and calls down:

“Excuse me, can you help? I promised a friend I’d be somewhere half an hour ago but I’m completely lost. Can you tell me where I am?”

The man replies:

“You are about 30 feet above this field, you are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and between 58 and 60 W. longitude”

“You must be an engineer” says the balloonist.

“I am!” says the man, “How did you know?”

The balloonist laughs, “well, everything you’ve told me is correct, but I don’t understand what you are talking about and I’m still lost”

“Ah, you’re a manager” says the engineer

“Indeed I am!” replies the balloonist, “How could you possibly know that?”

“Well…” says the engineer, “you don’t know where you are and you don’t know where you are going. You’ve made a promise you can’t keep and you expect me to solve your problem. You are in exactly the same position as you were before we met, except now somehow it’s my fault!”

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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Having used kanban as a catalyst for continual improvement I feel more capable, confident and way more productive than I have ever been in my life. Starting with a simple plan-doing-done approach to my kanban boards, I quickly evolved them to meet the needs of particular situations. I’ll describe how I have used kanban to adapt my approach and get more things done.

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