Events coming up

Tonight there is a great sounding talk on applying Lean and Agile practices in your company by an equally great speaker, Alan Shalloway. I’m looking forward to this talk as it makes a nice change for someone else other than myself to be talking about these important ideas.

Cuke Up is an all day acceptance testing conference with the project leaders and influential people behind Behaviour Driven Development, Cucumber and SpecFlow. If you want to extend your TDD approach, this is a great place to find out more.

I am trying to get a monthly Java practical session started (hopefully by May) were we spend a couple of hours practising TDD and/or BDD, similar to the coding dojos of the Python, Scala and Clojure communities. The practical events would also look at interesting API’s (eg. new stuff in Java7), open source tools and libraries (too many to mention) and getting the most out of the tools we use (IDE’s, Continuous Integration servers, build tools, etc). I am talking with with Oracle, IBM and SkillsMatter about possibly holding and sponsoring the event, but if anyone else is interested in helping out that would be great.

There is another full house at our re-run of the modern Java concurrency event. Its good to know we have found something or members are very interested in. If you want us to do more on concurrency or other subjects, please let us know.

I am really looking forward to meeting Ed Yourdon of “Death March” fame at the end of March. Ed is coming to SkillsMatter to give a talk on what has changed in IT projects since he wrote the book and I am really looking forward to this talk. Sign up quick, this is going to be great!! “Death march” projects have been all to familiar phenomenon since the beginning of the IT industry and Ed Yourdon’s book discusses them in detail. Some aspects of death-march projects have gotten better and others have gotten worse, since the onset of the current “Great Recession.” Ed will discuss these changes, with emphasis on changes in development practices, as well as a commentary about peopleware and modern collaboration tools.

News

The ServerSide Java Symposium is probably the biggest news recently in Java land. Our very own well grounded developers Martijn Verberg and Ben Evens have been over in Las Vegas speaking. They were given a slot next to James Gosling, so I am sure there was no pressure :-)

For those unfortunate not to make the event, there is a big batch of videos to TheServerSide Java Symposium conference coverage page, with lots of news and other coverage available. There was some live blogging going on too.

In other news, there was an interesting article on creating neural networks using Netbeans, I am sure my genetic algorithms course was never this easy :-)

Do you know the design patterns that are used in our Java JDK? Have a trip over to Java Code Geeks to find out if your right!

And finally, did anyone see a bigger moon over the weekend. It was a super full moon on Saturday 19th.

Summary of Last weeks events

There was a cross LJC/GDC event last night at UCL giving an introduction to test driven development, one of the most significant design practices in industry today. I gave a short presentation on TDD practices and why they are valuable to delivering a good solution, discussing the idea of TDD as a design tool and only testing code as a consequence. The short presentation was followed by over an our of people working together on a set challenge, using the test first approach. It was great to see such a buzz of discussion going on and people pairing and grouping up, I had trouble getting most people to stop so we could clear the lecture theatre and go to the pub. Thanks to everyone that came along and hope to see you at the LJC Java dojo we are planning or at the TDD/BDD half day workshop I am running on the 17th May as part of the London Tester Gathering days.

On Monday 14th I ran a workshop on distributed versus centralised version control, comparing git / mercurial / bazaar with subversion. The workshop was mainly aimed at students and graduates and all the information is on the tooling up website. I am planning a more advance workshop which will cover more aspects of distributed version control systems (DVCS) and some insight on moving from subversion to Git / Mercurial.

Adrian, one of the members of the GDC had there first book review published on Slashdot.org, with the help of my Slashdot book review submission guide. Thanks to Packt Publishing for supplying the Solr 1.4 Enterprise search book.

There was another successful Scala coding dojo where I set a St Patrick day theme. The challenge was to create a series of maze rooms linked together by doors. Once you created three or more rooms you could place a pint of Guinness in one of the rooms for your leprechaun to find. Some of the code is available at the LSug Assembla.com online git repository.

I was lucky enough to make it to the functional programming Exchange at SkillsMatter last Friday. I had a great day and learnt a lot more about functional programming and am even more hooked on learning Haskell now, although it will have to wait until my JAX London talk on Clojure. There was a very entertaining and enlightening talk by Simon Penton-Jones on parallelism and all the amazing things they have been doing with Haskell. It seems Haskell is the really research bed of modern functional language development, with much of the work Simon is doing going into languages such as F#. There was a great presentation by Jonas Boner on the Akka framework, an effective and performant way to manage state in an immutable functional world. Jonas was talking about how writing correct concurrent, fault-tolerant and scalable applications is no longer a problem that is too hard when you use the right tools. David Pollak gave lots of info about all the improvements and additions in the Lift framework (a Ruby/Rails style web framework for Scala) as well as lots of future plans for Lift. David really knows his stuff and there were some very detailed banter between David and Simon. The Lift web framework embraces Scala’s functional side and provides transformations from web requests to responses, a transformation-based templating system, and Ajax support via functions. As an example of Lift, David wrote a session aware chat client with a single Scala class managing the shared state of the chat server. You’d be challenged to write something terser in Ruby.

If you have write-ups of any events, please let the list know or send them directly to me.

Thank you
@jr0cket

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There is a real challenge to improve the way you work whilst still retaining and increasing the amount of value you can deliver to your organisation.

The more people have the opportunity to step back and consider how they “get things done” the more opportunity there is for improvement. It is tragic that most people are of the mindset that they are too busy to consider how they work as they have deadlines, this mindset is often driven by the system that is the organisation.

Until you can step back and really understand the work, you have little appreciation of the wasteful activities you do and therefore can really only “solutionise”.  Anything you that is not based on some “fact finding” seems little more than guess work or just following a trend and hoping for the best.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket

You can very easily get netbeans to use your full name when it generates code from it templates, rather than what ever you set your account name to be.

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Whilst discussing the merits of Behaviour Driven Development at one of the XTC gatherings, I started using the term minimal responsible feature as a way to express how to decide what piece of work to tackle next. I promised Liz Keogh many moons ago that I would write a blog post about it, so here it is.

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I have coach team in agile for a while and decided to venture out with my own company. Choosing a good name for the company was important as I wanted a way to simply define what service I offered. I chose the name lean agile machine for my company in part as a parody on the term lean mean machine. I was looking for something that expressed the concepts I was interested in at the time lean system thinking and agile software development.

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Cloning an existing virtual machine is not an obvious part of the VirtualBox user interface, even in version 4 of Virtualbox. You have three options as far as I can tell

1) Export an existing virtual machine and import as a new machine
2) Create a new virtual machine using a cloned hard drive file
3) Create a new virtual machine using a copied hard drive file with a changed unique identification number (not official supported)

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Karl Scotland and I will be running a free games night at Skills Matter on the evening of 7th March at SkilsMatter - London, UK.

Karl has kindly volunteered to run the games night before his talk at QCon later in the week. Karl will be running the ball flow game to help us learn and experience kanban and system thinking concepts in a collaborative way. It will also be a lot of fun, as fun is an effective way to learn.

You should get a lot out of this evening whether your experienced practitioner or you are completely new to kanban, lean, system thinking and theory of constraints. The evening will be a welcoming and safe environment to everyone.

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Using Virtualbox is a way to run an isolated environment on your desktop and help manage a consistent deployment process. To have Virtualbox running efficiently on Ubuntu you really should install the utilities and drivers that come in the Virtualbox Guest Editions addon.

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Events coming up

I’m looking forward to another London Clojure coding dojo (now full), the last one was great fun and I will try and practice some more TDD/BDD in clojure this week. The format of the dojo has changed and makes it easier to get more involved. Rather than have two people at a time with everyone watching, everyone is now split into groups of four, having there own mini-dojo, with all groups working on the same project. There is a quick show-n-tell session at the end so the groups can show each other what they have done.

Whats happening in Java

It would seem that Oracle lawyers are worried about shipping JUnit with Netbeans and have advised the netbeans team to no longer ship JUnit with netbeans 7. If anyone knows what the problem is behind this then I am sure we’d be interested to hear. The netbeans team do have a very simple way of allowing you to add JUnit when you first run netbeans, so its not a big issue in my book (yet).

Interesting video of the week

There is an interesting TED talk on how architects have learnt to build complex structures by looking at nature. I think is an interesting talk that helps you understand the thought processes of architects and encourages you to think outside of the box. I hope you enjoy this talk at TEDSalon in London by Michael Pawlyn describes three habits of nature that could transform architecture and society: radical resource efficiency, closed loops, and drawing energy from the sun.

Summary of Last weeks events

Tuesday was another very successful social night for the LJC (and GDC,LSug,LCg,LtdWIPSoc). In case you missed the event, I did a quick write up of the night on the LJC blog.

Great fun was had at the London Scala coding dojo last week. As with the Clojure and Python dojos, the scala dojo has also switched to running the dojo as groups. So once all the pizza was eaten we chose a problem for the evening and split up into groups. The problem chosen was the Roman Numberals calculator and there were some interesting approaches - as can be seen on the LSug Assembla online git repository.

If you have write-ups of any events, please let the list know.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket

It seems Oracle lawyers have advised the Netbeans team that they can no longer ship JUnit with the Netbeans IDE. I originally did not understand this issue (see update below), but it seems that the Netbeans team have a neat way to deal with this “advice” anyway.

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