codified

Last week I had the opportunity and pleasure of attending 2 of 3 days at the Norwegian Developers Conference, for the first time, I must admit. The overall impressions are quite good, although I could wish for even more “food for thought” on some of the sessions I went to.

The introduction on the first day with Anders Norås, rapping “You down with NDC?” was fun, but quite frankly, too early in the morning.

The keynote with Robert C. Martin, “Are you a professional?” was a real boost. He talked about all the stuff we developers, architects should know, master and do in order to call ourselves professionals. The main focus towards the end of the keynote was test-driven development and clean code. This an area I try to get better in all the time and to me, this keynote was reassuring and inspirational.

On the first day, I attended two sessions with almost the same content, Hanselman and Bolognese, although Hanselman had a broader agenda with his “Deep Tour of .NET 4″ than Bolognese’s “The Future of C#”. I bit my mark on the primary news on .NET 4 and C# 4.0 with support for dynamic data  type and parallell extensions. The point that MEF is going to be part of this is also very welcome. I’ve used MEF from CodePlex on a few occasions and find it incredible to work with.

“Black Belt Ninja Tips ASP.NET MVC” with Phil Haack didn’t do that much to me, but it was interesting enough. The standing impression after the session was that it lacked some of the “ahah”-stuff I would like to be shown.

The last session I attended on day one was “Zen of Architecture” with Juval Löwy. This one turned out to be quite interesting, where Löwy talked about the IDesign [his company] Method. Although notthing revolutionary, the simplistic approach to architecture and design appealed to me and I would recommend anyone interested in architecture and design to check out the IDesign site.

The third day, I chose to spend with Mary Poppendieck and her sessions on Lean thinking. I’ve heard about her and the lean-way from co-workers and on the blogospere and thought that I’d better not miss this chance. I attended all sessions but the last one on “Great People”. Anyway, what I experienced was this lady talking about lean thinking, using various stories from her own experience and from the work with the books she and her husband has written. Although interesting, I have to admit that I probably missed the point somewhere in-between all the stories and examples. I’ve decided to buy some of her books to see if I can get a grasp on what she’s really talking about.

When talking to my colleagues, who attended other sessions, I got the impression that I might have been better off on one of those session in terms of value for money, but in the end I feel I got my share.

In the end, I feel that it was great to be at the conference and I hope to be able to attend next year as well.

Did you attend NDC 2009? If so, what do you think? What was the best sessions in your opinion?

Last week I ordered an Arduino starter kit. I have wanted to do this for some time and now I finally got around to actually get one. Only thing with buying stuff online - instead of buying from a store, taking the stuff with you as you leave, you will have this painstakingly period of time waiting for the package to arrive. I love it - and hate it! The moment I pushed the confirm purchase button, I wanted the package to be on my doorstep. This is why there always will be a need for local stores - I (and probably many with me) hate to wait to get stuff…

Anyway, finally, “the stuff” arrived! My Arduino Duemilanove starter kit.

One thing that struck me was how easy it was to get started. Download the software (I’m running on Ubuntu 9.04), plug in the Arduino using the USB cable, fire up the Arduino IDE and off you go! It just worked, right out of the box. The Windows installation had one more step - installing the USB serial driver - otherwise from that just as easy. High five to the Arduino folks! Keep up the amazing work!

After having played around with this sweet little piece of hardware, checking out the samples, mounting various components on the breadboard, I find myself wondering where to go next - or rather - what kind of project should I start with?

I’ve always wanted to build my own robot, with wheels, motors and sensors - maybe even a camera - I haven’t decided on what purpose it should have yet.

Or should I just jump into this autonomous RC - helicopter idea I’ve had for a while?

Or, maybe I could create a traffic counter (to monitor how many cars that passes by during a day outside my house, to collect arguments for getting the politicians build a pedestrian field). That thing could even measure the speed of the vehicles.

Or I could simply build my own weather station.

Or… The possibilities seems endless, given some minor cash expenditures and a bit of work. If I can manage to decide on a project, I’ll be posting progress and results here. If you have suggestions on things that would be useful (or not so useful), kind of cool (although not too advanced) to build I would be grateful.

Thinking and pondering over the new-found enlightenment after the scrum course, I’ve tried to figure out what it might mean to “do the simplest thing that could possibly work“. While taken from XP, it also is a mantra of scrum and TDD.

One idea I’ve come up with is at least one possible approach : Naïve code.

The term Näive code is borrowed from the graphic artists world, as in naïve drawings/paintings - very simplistic, in some senses almost childish, although elaborately crafted. It takes some skills to achieve the “proper näivity” and is in no way any excuse for smelly code or “broken windows”.

“The simplest thing that could possibly work” is simply pointing out that most software follows the 80/20 rule : 80 percent of the benefit comes from 20 percent of the work. This means, most often, that you should build your software vertically - not horizontally; where horizontally implies that you build or set up all the frameworks beforehand and vertically that you should take each bit of functionality and build it by itself.

I’ve read my share of literature on patterns, TDD, DDD, AOP. I’ve studied and used a number of frameworks for ORM’s, MVC and so on and what gets to me is the sheer number of frameworks and techologies that are out there and what a developer needs to know or master in order to “do it right” and at the same time not use any time while doing it.

I have often found myself digging too deep into making the struts, preparing frameworks and creating stuff I think would be nice to have later on in the project, only to find that that stuff never came to use. Why?

(more…)

I’ve been battling my Ubuntu server for the past week after installing/upgrading from 8.04 to 8.10 because it seemed to break the VirtualBox installation.

The problems started after upgrading my Ubuntu 8.04 amd64 server with desktop installation to 8.10. The desktop wouldn’t work any more (X and Gnome starting in low resolution) and VirtualBox coming out with an error message which suggested I should do a ‘/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup’. Now, I tried un-installing Gnome, X, Ubuntu-desktop, VirtualBox and the like, but I still couldn’t get it to work properly. I understood that this might have something with DKMS to do, but I could not find any posts pointing me in the right direction.

The solution for me, after having screened the net for hours and days and talking to colleagues, was to include the appropriate linux source header files. I added linux-headers-generic, linux-headers-server and linux-headers-virtual. I probably could have gotten away with linux-headers-server only, but I’m not quite sure about this. Any comments would be appreciated.

After installed these files and rebooted, I suddenly had a fully working system again, even with the proprietary fglrx modules nicely compiled which enabled compiz to work. The VirtualBox also came up with no problems. Yiihah!

Whoah! An enlightenment!

I attended a Certified ScrumMaster course last week with Kenny Rubin from Innolution as the instructor. The course was truly inspiring and informative. Mr. Rubin took us thoroughly through the process, roles, artifacts as well as user stories, planning and estimation. Interspersed with both success and failure stories I think we got a good value for the money.

I’ll just say it up front : I’m sold! I’m going in this direction. This is what we should do when taking on development tasks.

Troubled waters?

I’ve heard about scrum for years and have been to various seminars, my current employer is interested in using scrum as the project management template for our projects and I’ve even tried to use the scrum process - and failed miserably.

I know now why my attempts has failed; Neither I, my co-workers, hired consultants or my company’s leaders understood the process. We didn’t have the faintest clue about what we were trying to do, project management-wise - or should I say - unwise.

I also have heard about others trying to implement scrum as their project management process and failing as well as some success stories. Now, I must admit, I’m somewhat biased and fired up since attending the course, but there seems to be some stuff that just has “clicked” into place for me.

What I have just realized is that scrum is a somewhat strict and even rigid process that supports agility! You need to conform to some vital aspects of scrum in order to make it work - the process itself isn’t up for modification unless you know exactly what you’re doing.

How can that be? Isn’t scrum supposed to be agile and flexible in itself? Why shouldn’t I make my own scrum process, fitted and adapted to my company’s needs? The short answer to that is a resounding NO! (and yes, within some limitations).

Here’s my take on why. Just remember, I’m not very experienced with the process, although I’ve tried it a few times.

(more…)

I read an article in the September 2008 edition of Scientific American called “Reflections on Privacy 2.0″ by Esther Dyson and this has inspired some thinking on my behalf which I would like to share. I know, Ester Dyson is a far reaching luminary and I only aspire to assess, make use of and learn from her thoughts.

Why should we care?
The issue at hand is a exponentially growing problem, or potential problem, as we all increasingly expose information about ourselves on various social-networking enabled sites on the internet. We have this wonderful technology enabling us to connect to other people, make new connections or friendships, let our connections know what we’re up to at any moment. Most such sites have privacy settings that one may edit to limit or expand what information fellow networkers may or may not see, but most often these settings are ignored.

It’s surprisingly easy to get quite a bit of information online about almost any person that has some online presence, even those who don’t have an online presence. (more…)

This is a re-post of an article I wrote in my “old” blog :

I’ve recently tried to come up with a list of some tools that may help in agile software development, mostly because I see the need for some at work, but also inspired by choices made by the customers I work with. I’ve picked these tools because I have had the chance to use them for real work and I found out that I even like some of them. These tools help me getting work done as well as communicate with my company’s clients. (more…)

Hi all.. nothing new for the moment, except for that I just had to install new server, software, new blog — in short mostly new stuff in the bottom of things here.