2009-06-10

Agila Sverige

The Agila Sverige Event was great, two days with 58 topics that ranged from the details of "Lean and Scrum" by our very own Joakim Sundén to human to human interaction and judo by Humanova. The event is a copy of "Smidig" held in Norway where the morning sessions were lightning talks (10 minutes max) and afternoons with three open space sessions. What a great way to inspire attendees and speakers to participate. Rather than passively consume the time, everyone is responsible to make as much as possible of the time. And it worked out great, thank you organizers and participants. The Avega posse at the event was massive as people noticed. Well done everyone, Christophe, Johanna and Jocke's presentation were duly appreciated. We apparently made an impression. Hope to see you there next time.

As a humble apprentice, this was a perfect match with short one-way communication and the interactive open space sessions to follow up on ideas from the audience. Was it so worthwhile that I would recommend it? Definitely!

Postad av Gunnar Ahlberg

2009-02-19

Programming in Scala

Spent some (not all) of my vacation reading "Programming in Scala". I've read chapters from the pre-editions and was really looking forward to the final paperback version.

You get a functional language that is beautifully mixed with many OO principles.

You get Erlang message based concurrency implementation.

And you get it on the x86 of modern platforms - JVM and above 1.4.

  So how this done? Well, the word's of Java expert James Goosling on Java ONE last year: "Which Programming Language would you use *now* on top of JVM, except Java?". The answer was surprisingly fast and very clear: - Scala. A trivial example of why is in my implementation of "Snake" - the classic game found on most mobile phones. It fits in on a single piece of paper, without looking like a contestant in the ongoing obfuscating code contest. It has case classes, enumeration, implicit conversions. And I can show it to my wife and she can comprehend the code. Ok, she is computer literate than most of you, but still, she isn't a programmer. She isn't too familiar with Java either. But, she's good at understanding logic. That is a good example of the old test, "show your code to your neighbor" 

 Now to something more interesting. Lets look at an example of message based concurrency with real-time hot swapping -http://jonasboner.com/2009/02/12/event-sourcing-using-actors.html is that cool or what?

Postad av Gunnar Ahlberg

2009-01-20

Formatting a pre tag

Apparantly the <pre> tag made some browsers other than ff3 feel dizzy in my previous post, that's updated now, thank you Markus Torpvret!

Just a thought, should we make the comment section more available?

Postad av Gunnar Ahlberg

2009-01-09

Why is a good question. Why BDD?

This is from a very interesting Behaviour Driven Framework named Cucumber.

What if you have a requirement and you know that you want to describe this in a behavior yet meaningful fashion? What is the best approach? I don't know, here is a post from someone who does. It really boils down to the well known (right?) Given-When-Then approach.  Sometimes, a little help is required. In this case, a simple "Why?" with right timing was the cure. I like why questions, it really shows if how people reason.

#cucumber @ irc.freenode.net

[5:08pm] Luis_Byclosure: I'm having problems applying the "5 Why" rule, 	
	                to the feature  "login" (imagine an application like 
                         youtube)
[5:08pm] Luis_Byclosure: how do you explain the business value of the feature
                         "login"?
[5:09pm] Luis_Byclosure: In order to be recognized among other people, I want 
                         to login in the application (?)
[5:09pm] Luis_Byclosure: why do I want to be recognized among other people?
[5:11pm] aslakhellesoy:  Why do people have to log in?
[5:12pm] Luis_Byclosure: I dunno... why? 
[5:12pm] aslakhellesoy:  I'm asking you
[5:13pm] aslakhellesoy:  Why have you decided login is needed?
[5:13pm] Luis_Byclosure: identify users
[5:14pm] aslakhellesoy:  Why do you have to identify users?
[5:14pm] Luis_Byclosure: maybe because people like to know who is 
                         publishing what
[5:15pm] aslakhellesoy:  Why would anyone want to know who's publishing what?
[5:17pm] Luis_Byclosure: because if people feel that that content belongs 
                         to someone, then the content is trustworthy
[5:17pm] aslakhellesoy:  Why does content have to appear trustworthy?
[5:20pm] Luis_Byclosure: Trustworthy makes people interested in the content 
                         and consequently in the website
[5:20pm] Luis_Byclosure: Why do I want to get people interested in the website?
[5:20pm] aslakhellesoy:  :-)
[5:21pm] aslakhellesoy:  Are you selling something there? Or is it just 
                         for fun?
[5:21pm] Luis_Byclosure: Because more traffic means more money in ads
[5:21pm] aslakhellesoy:  There you go!
[5:22pm] Luis_Byclosure: Why do I want to get more money in ads? Because I 
                         want to increase the revenues.
[5:22pm] Luis_Byclosure: And this is the end, right?
[5:23pm] aslakhellesoy:  In order to drive more people to the website and earn
                         more admoney, authors should have to login, 
                         so that the content can be displayed with the author 
                         and appear more trustworthy.
[5:23pm] aslakhellesoy:  Does that make any sense?
[5:25pm] Luis_Byclosure: Yes, I think so
[5:26pm] aslakhellesoy:  It's easier when you have someone clueless (like me) 
                         to ask the stupid why questions
[5:26pm] aslakhellesoy:  Now I know why you want login 
[5:26pm] Luis_Byclosure: but it is difficult to find the reason for everything
[5:26pm] aslakhellesoy:  And if I was the customer I am in better shape to 
                         prioritise this feature among others
[5:29pm] Luis_Byclosure: true!

Postad av Gunnar Ahlberg