Blog

Love and Fear in an Earth Sandwich

Fri. 6 Nov 2009 12:26:16 GMT

Oh man, Ze Frank rocked last night. What a fun, hilarious expedition through some of the simplest elements - fear and love in this case – that we recognize in each other even across something as complex as, errrr, well, the interne! His “work” seems inspired from anywhere and everywhere, but it’s also always real, and a collaboration with whoever wants to jump in. That guy brings an invitation to play in the purest form - best of all it's creative, but also smart and inspiringly human. An earth sandwich? Sweeeeet!

Is the Off Button the Only Answer?

Fri. 6 Nov 2009 14:56:11 GMT

Scott Handelsman led the day off today with a keynote that followed right along with the take-aways from Marc Lesser. Going from taking the time to ask the important questions about what we want to avoid in life, and how to get more done by doing less, Scott started with that premise and offered everyday examples of what we can do about it. He got us applying the lessons learned right down to how you manage your email account.

Do it - Drop it - Delegate it - Defer it, man. Divest your psychic weight, dude

For a conference with efficiency and effectiveness as a theme this talk hit the bull’s-eye. Now maybe we can finally get some stuff done.

Procedural, class-oriented, role-driven: history of programming in 80 minutes

Fri. 6 Nov 2009 15:02:58 GMT

Friday, 6th of November 2009 at Øredev. The time had come to sit in on the one of the main attractions of the conference. A talk by the man to whom many of us developers owe their career. (If you have worked with Object Orientation and Model-View-Controller you belong in that category).

Trygve Reenskaug made a monumental talk about rethinking the foundations of Object-Oriented development that spanned the three "ages" of programming: its genesis, the difficult maturing stage, and the recent breakthrough at a higher level.

The first part, "Procedure Orientation: Success" detailed the dawn of programming discipline where chunking code for readability and testability were good practices. Developers used to review each others' code to find bugs; failing early was considered good. If this sounds like something you've heard before, you're right. Procedural programmers of the day were Agile by default. They found what worked and stuck to it.

The next stage ("Class Orientation: Collapse") was more complicated. By that time, it was decided that a program should model the real world by mirroring its objects. Accounts, Users, and Money were represented in classes that at runtime had certain behavior, roles, and responsibilities. This was a major cognitive breakthrough for developers, however it also resulted in a dangerous chasm. To stakeholders, the program was a dynamic system with a certain behavior. The implementors had to deal with a different picture: all this behavior had to be represented using primitives that were static in nature: classes, attributes, objects. Stakeholder - developer communication became complicated.

Enter the last stage ("True OO: a new beginning"); the revival of "true" Object-Oriented development. Now, we are back at what objects were SUPPOSED to do in the first place. An object is something that plays a role. And a role exists in a certain context. (Like acts in a theater play are contexts for roles?) That is crucial. Without context, everything is static. Add context, and everything comes alive; roles can be injected into objects at runtime (context is dynamic!). By now you're probably wondering what exactly these roles are - how do you code them?? While getting into the gory details seems to be overkill for this blog (and would do no justice to Trygve's talk), consider this: roles are something that can have methods!!

With this renaissance of Object Orientation, best practices suddenly shine again. Peer code reviews become meaningful, because now you'll be reviewing both the class AND its context! This is responsibility-driven design.

This has no doubt been of the most memorable sessions of Øredev. I'm glad I attended it - otherwise I would have missed something that is crucial to the programming discipline and where it is going today.

Getting to know Cukes

Fri. 6 Nov 2009 16:48:33 GMT

Is Behavior-Driven Development just syntactic sugar for integration testing? That's the question I have been asking more than once recently. There's RSpec, and there's Cucumber - if you are a Ruby developer you'd have heard about those. But why should you do BDD? Because BDD tests cover something Unit Tests don't? That's not the case - in terms of code coverage, BDD doesn't add anything.

(Take a Rails application for example. You can test model integrity with unit tests; application logic with functional tests; and user-app interaction flow with integration tests. That's complete coverage).

Having these doubts about BDD I was eager to sit in on the Cucumber session with Aslak Hellesöy. Things were a bit more involved than I thought. Firstly, it became obvious that Cucumber (or Gharkin, the DSL that powers it) parses human-readable text into strings into which regular expressions can be inserted at runtime.

(Ample amounts of human-readable text is what flashes in the eye when first viewing BDD code. It's easy to think of BDD as something only non-techies can read, but there's more to the picture).

Another interesting detail is that Cucumber follows a well-defined convention for testing. You are Given something, and When you do something else Then something third happens. That's a nice coupling of syntax and semantics. Function follows form. Otherwise it'd be easy to get an impression that nearly everything goes into a Cucumber test spec.

Upon asking Aslak what exactly is Cucumber for: is it mainly for stakeholder - developer communication or is it a superior testing tool aimed at the developer, I received the following answer:

"Cucumber is a stakeholder-team communication tool designed to add more value to the client, however it is also a good developer tool that is capable of providing project documentation at all stages of development: before-coding, during-coding, and after-coding".

A good and exhaustive answer. Now, is Cucumber for you?

Café Øredev

Fri. 6 Nov 2009 17:23:07 GMT

Was hanging out at the gourmet coffee bar on the side of the exhibition floor. For the past three years Øredev has asked Johan & Nystrom to set up shop here for everyone to enjoy (what? developers like coffee?). The guy behind the bar is Mattias Sjöbäck, the Manager for Southern Sweden for Johan & Nystrom – a rather special kind of coffee company. And their elixir, served by heroes of the craft (yes, only an artist can foam like that) is incredibly delicious. I was walking around like an idiot saying “I think this is the best I’ve ever had. I think this is the best I ever had.”

The company is a specialty roasterie (sp?) that actually goes and visits each of the farms from which they purchase. They do this for quality assurance, but also to make sure the farm is operated in a socially responsible manner. That way they can deal directly with the farm allowing it receive an even better deal than certified fair trade.

But I think that’s not the best thing that is making a stop at the Øredev branch of Johan & Nystrom cool: Mattias and his partners consider themselves coffee geeks analogous to the techie geeks gathered at Øredev. Of course they don’t know what any of the tech talk is about so the conversations that happen while they make your cappuccino slide over to the more personal. It’s a spot in the Øredev mix of talking, listening, sharing, where we’re just plain hanging out with new people – over the best coffee you’ve ever had.

What not to test: do you know or do you think you know?

Fri. 6 Nov 2009 17:26:39 GMT

Last talk of the last day at Øredev 2009. I listened to "What not to test" by Robert Sabourin.   I like testing because I am fortunate enough to belong to a school of programming that wants to do things the right way. So naturally I was intrigued by the theme of the talk. Isn't testing Always Good?

After listening to the talk I still believe this to be the case. However, there might be situations in your career when this will be unfeasible for some reason or another. In this situation knowing what not to test is far superior to skipping a test you didn't know you had to do!

Knowing what not to test comes from knowing as much as possible about what to do test. To this end, Robert advocates continuously collecting testing ideas - on all levels possible. Study how to attack systems and get ideas for testing. Study how your application will be used by users (as opposed to knowing just what the application does for the users). Study specifications and try turning them upside down for alternative usage scenarios that you might have be unaware of.

Look at performance, capabilities, environments, failure models. Become aware of stress levels and state changes.

And so on judgment day you and your application will not be unprepared.

This concludes the blogging from Øredev sessions. Now, with all the great ideas, knowledge, and inspiration, there's only one thing left to do; become a better developer!

Good luck and see you next year.

Future of the web: developer paradise

Thu. 5 Nov 2009 12:05:22 GMT

Being a web nut, I planned for "The Future of Web Applications" by Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer. The web as platform is a compelling case - at least in my view. (Software is moving to the web to a large degree, even applications traditionally viewed as desktop applications. Because web-based software per definition is directed at the broadest user base possible, it must be better than desktop software in every way: faster, simpler, more usable, sexier, and more functional).

It was exciting to see the presenters outline the many factors contributing to the web as platform. First, as Dion stressed, there's the browser runtime. Recent improvements in JavaScript virtual machines make it run exponentially faster than before! This makes possible some crazy real-time, computationally heavy JavaScript programs.

Then there's the "web in everywhere". What is the next stage of web evolution? Interestingly, it is ceasing to be "web only" - breaking out of the traditional sandbox. The web on the desktop and the web on devices (or is it devices on the web?) - how about that? Personally, I think this is both logical and desirable. Logical because the web can theoretically "be" on every device that is capable of connecting to it. Desirable because a standardized platform is a good platform. So I know which platform I'd rather develop for!

Kudos to Palm for being the 1st mobile company to embrace web as platform. (As Ben mentioned it they are unlikely to remain the only one).

Text, box, image - these largely remain were the primitives of web development. Therefore it's amazing to see how sophisticated things can get with only these basic concepts.

What an evolution the web has undergone. Not long ago developers needed to create pages for 2-3 different browsers, each with multiple versions. Now, with each year, there appear numerous tools for development, testing, profiling, and just experimenting with the latest technologies, which are both standardized and cutting-edge. The presentation was just a glimpse of what will be; it made abundantly clear, however, that we have come a long way since the blink tag.

Microrevolution in web semantics: formatting markup in a meaningful way

Thu. 5 Nov 2009 15:08:00 GMT

I've always thought that microformats are intriguing. They're not an official specification; they add nothing to the existing web standards stack that already isn't there; and they seem to be one of those rare "bottom-up" innovations that become a part of our toolbox solely through an organically increasing user base. They were the topic of a talk by Karsten Januszewski from Microsoft research.

Microformats solve a simple problems really well, and that is perhaps the secret to their increasing popularity: they add meaning to web pages through conventions for XHTML attribute elements (notably the "class" element). This meaning can then be extracted from the markup by software and "sliced and diced" for further effect.

Microformats are both "extensible" and "not". Extensible because it is relatively easy to propose a new microformat (the microformats wiki hosts both the list of ratified microformats and current proposals). Not extensible because once a new format is accepted, one cannot use it to define one's own specialized or fine-grained version of it. In other words, "subclassing" a microformat is impossible.

It's interesting how the microformat movement is going to deal with its challenges. According to Karsten, these are:

Meaningless microformats (isn't that easy? Don't ratify them).
Browser support (this one has never been easy, I guess).
Search engine support (in spite of half a billion microformatted pages, SEs haven't been quick in processing them. I find this a bit paradoxical. Are microformats too "primitive" for SEs? Sometimes, a thing can be good even if doesn't require intricate algorithmics).
Tooling issues (before long, some open source IDE will start supporting microformat development. Who's first?)

All in all, a nice talk about about an interesting topic. Microformats are a part of the next web. To what extent will become more clear in the coming years. Much lies in our hands as developers. Microformat development, anyone?

Overheard in the Speakers' Lounge

Thu. 5 Nov 2009 15:57:28 GMT

Currently a roundtable discussion on everyone’s current projects (check this out.), next projects (is there overlap?), and the future of the biz (Oracle wants to buy Sun?). We've got choices of language (of course), should you jailbreak your iphone? (wait, is that cheating or just good sense?), and which other speaker session are you headed to next?

The Øredev Environment

Thu. 5 Nov 2009 16:44:00 GMT

Sure the food is good, but you can’t help but notice the difference in what you’re eatin’ ON and WITH. I asked around: there was an explicit choice for Øredev to purchase eating utensils and plates that are compostable and made from renewable resources. They’re actually wood and fallen leaves (so non-harvested – you just collect them) Even the plastic glasses are made from corn. We go through a lot of these materials during the conference. We’re going through a lot of food and coffee too – fortunately it’s ecological, fair-trade coffee and food that is as locally produced as possible.

So bon apetit, my low impact friends.

The mobile web: novelty and familiarity in good measure

Thu. 5 Nov 2009 18:34:02 GMT

All right, so this time I decided to venture into uncharted territory: mobile development (and I'm no ace at JavaScript, either). Nevertheless I chose to attended Nicolai Onken's "Creating cross-platform mobile applications with the Dojo Toolkit". I had a feeling that mobile development is both different and familiar (the mobile platform is a new kid on the block - but hasn't JavaScript been around since1995?)

Many interesting insights were gleaned from this presentation. Firstly, it turns out that mobile and web development really aren't that different. (Yes, there are differences in screen sizes and hardware capacity). And secondly: much of what applies to good practices in web development transfers to mobile development (I consider this another case for the web as platform, described earlier in this blog). Judge for yourself:

Are you using the Web Standards trio (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript) to create prototypes for web applications? Well, you can create a perfect mobile app using the very same methodology, as exemplified by EventNinja.

Are you following Steve Souder's advice and minify JavaScript to improve performance? This is something you will be doing (religiously) when developing mobile apps.

(You might, however, find that writing inline CSS improves performance. This flies in the face of good web practice, but consider that for the mobile platform craves every little performance tweak available. As Nikolai said, "Do what your runtime can do and not more". This means, among other things, no rounded-corner effects using a "div" per shaved-off pixel of a rounded corner ;-).

Have you used JSON in a web app? As Nikolai believes, JSON (!=XML) is the format for mobile development.

In fact, mobile development being the sandbox for cutting-edge tricks now begins to influence web applications and browsers - things are turning around. So much so that geolocation, which has probably been among the top mobile apps, is finding its way into the web browser (Firefox is doing it already).

And, it may surprise many developers that CSS 3 is available on many mobile devices! So, if you have been tinkering with a cutting-edge mobile app utilizing CSS 3 it may be pushing the technology's adoption for web applications, some way down the line in the future.

The mobile web is here, and it's both same and different.

Sometimes Good Mostly Means Not Bad

Thu. 5 Nov 2009 18:50:50 GMT

Sat in on the session Understanding the Origins of Destructive Leadership with Leo Kant this morning. It was a good reminder that leading in your project or organization or wherever is more than just doing more of the good stuff – you really have to beware of the bad. It seems one bad move can overwhelm many demonstrations of good leadership. Yes indeed, bad leadership leads a life of its own, it can co-exist with the good and still do its damage, because they are simply not on the same scale.

Leo called destructive leadership repeated bad behavior that violates the interest and objectives of the organization and/or the motivation, well-being or job satisfaction of subordinates. (major paraphrase)

He also noted that most leaders engage in both quite commonly. So if you missed the session, check it out on video, or at least be aware that the research shows there’s more to being a good leader than just being a good leader.

On programmer productivity and hairy quadrupeds

Thu. 5 Nov 2009 21:16:00 GMT

This day concluded with a special topic. Neal Ford gave a talk about being a productive programmer; something close to the heart of every programmer capable of reflection (pun intended).

Did you know that it is faster to type than navigate to files in directory trees using file browsers and finders? Yep, I'm talking about the power of the old UNIX command line. Neal's advice is: use an content indexer program to be able to navigate to any file, anywhere. Better still, build one (you're a hacker, right?). Here we have something essential:

When you 1) acknowledge a problem; 2) begin to treat it like a 1st-class problem, two thing happen. First, you begin building long-term assets out of throwaway scripts. Secondly, you end up with 1st-class tools!

(Just take the example of Neal's book, The Productive Programmer. Originally a collection of all-around scripting recipes, it developed into a book about productivity when Neal realized this "recipe list" wasn't something he himself would be interested in reading).

Automate tasks whenever possible and use version control. (Hint: Git is good). Start the day with 2 glasses of water (OK, this one is from me, not Neal).

Have a "focus strategy" when you can work uninterrupted for the time it takes to achieve flow with whatever you're working on. "Flow" is the state of complete immersion in the task, when the most challenging becomes most enjoyable. Don't interrupt this by checking email - you'll be wasting hours of productivity. Instead, allocate time to reading emails and do this in batches, as a 1st-class activity. So rather than disrupting the flow of work with email, read email during a certain time and achieve flow with that! What a nugget.

Fail fast, fail spectacularly. Fail with your computer exploding, if that's what it takes for you to come face to face with your problem. That way you'll improve sooner and more thoroughly.

And above all, don't shave yaks. You'll have to attend a talk by Neal Ford to find out what that means.

Beware the Busyness and Busyness Beware

Wed. 4 Nov 2009 13:00:47 GMT

Whoa! The blustering Malmö winds were making noises in the auditorium that sound like a child learning to play “twinkle twinkle little star” on the flute.

Marc Lesser kicked off the conference with a keynote that left the audience in speechless silence – a whole 60 seconds of it! It was an excellent reminder of how we can be a more peaceful AND more effective version of ourselves. Thank you Marc, for helping bring us to the right place to get the most out of these special days, and helping bridge the gap between the business of business and the business of me.

On Stage

Wed. 4 Nov 2009 13:17:48 GMT

Activity on the exhibition floor seems to keep rollin’ throughout the day with interviews and quick talks on the stage. Good for a quick “nugget o’ knowledge” between sessions.

Panoramic views and the outer space - visualizations at Oredev

Wed. 4 Nov 2009 13:44:49 GMT

So, it's November 9th 2009 and the Oredev conference has taken off; for me, it's 3 days of talks about the software industry on topics that I most enjoy. In the spirit of the times, I kicked off my first day with a popular topic - visualization.

Eric Stollnitz from Microsoft showed that there are more cool things to MicroSoft than the XMLHTTPRequest object. We were shown a slew of demos dealing with images and image processing. The common theme running through these applications was taking disparate chunks of visual information (images) and transforming them into a form natural for the human perception to process. There was an application that, given a large set of photographs, stitched them together into into one complete, continuous view. Imagine having taken a number of photos (of a landscape, for instance) from different angles. Navigating these images one by one has been the domain of a traditional photo gallery; the demo showed how these discrete photographs can be viewed much like the original, real-life original. To this end, images are "stitched" together and 3D panoramic effects are applied to the resulting landscape to make the viewing close to viewing the original. A flat photograph acquired depth and volume; zooming in felt like stepping up closer to the picture. (An aside: I never knew there were owls in the daytime on the rooftops of Seattle!)

The computational challenges of solving such a problem efficiently are interesting. For example, when handed N images (or pieces of a puzzle), how would you put them together to the original form without comparing every image to every other image (N*N comparisons)? Leave a comment below.

Other demos included The Worldwide Telescope, a collaboration between MicroSoft and various astronomy labs. Viewing planets and moons in real-time, and even zooming out to view or Galaxy (which looks like a fine, white mesh, like a coral reef suspended somewhere in the Universe) has never been easier.

All in all, this was an interesting presentation offering one possible answer to the question: "How do we best use the enormous computing power we have at our disposal"?

Eric's answer, with this presentation, is: "Help us visualize data to understand it better".

Efficiency? Yes, but don’t put the cart before the horse

Wed. 4 Nov 2009 15:27:47 GMT

Dan North brought some of the ideas of efficiency we’ve been hearing about into focus during an interview with the fellas from .NET Rocks, Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell. Bringing the discussion straight home to the developer world, he noted that efficiency is indeed the right thing to think about, once you’ve realized effectiveness.

Dan made a nice distinction between efficiency, meaning using fewer resources for a given result versus effectiveness, which is about getting results – and getting the ones you want. After all, optimizing is great when we’re optimizing the right thing. Effectiveness is like design, making the system do the right thing. Efficiency is about performance. So be effective first, and once that works right (enough) then start to optimize it. Or in .Net Rocks speak: just be awesome!

eXtreme Programming: "extreme" or battle-tested?

Wed. 4 Nov 2009 15:29:19 GMT

Most people in the software industry would probably agree that managing the process of software development can at times be more challenging than building the actual software. Weird and wonderful things have happened to teams where the technical and the managerial parts spoke different languages. Bridging this gap and having efficient processes was the the theme of "eXtreme programming in practice" by Neal Ford and it was a tour de force describing the sometimes irrational forces affecting the profession of a software developer.

Neal's talk made a bold promise at the beginning: to show how to selectively replace some of the benefits of extreme programming (XP) while at the same time retaining some of its benefits.

According to Ford, one of the best way to retain the benefits of XP turns out to be not trying to make it less "extreme". (What is "extreme programming" anyway? From a manager's perspective, it could as well mean dealing with programmers with extreme body art. Not a very corporate-friendly image, and therefore, according to Ford, an unfortunate name for a software development methodology).

If this sounds paradoxical, consider that XP is simply "things that worked, pushed to the extreme" and as such they have a well-defined structure. Trying to make XP more "pragmatical" doesn't work unless one maintains the structure of the process: the many nested iterations, the smaller feedback loops within the larger feedback loops that eventually constitute the entire process. Take away the structure and you'll likely to harm the outcome!

Another nugget of information was how to better manage the estimation process (accurate estimation of the duration of a software project is one of the Very Hard Things of software development). The solution offered by Ford is:

A) Don't ask developers "how long will it take you to complete this". Ask instead: "how complex is it, within the domain of the given system". Then, let the Project Manager convert this complexity estimate into a realistic time estimate using a number of well-defined load factors.

B) Use well-defined, quantifiable metrics to arrive at the load factor. To this end:

1) Define what it means to "be done";
2) Use a binary completion convention, i.e. either you are 0% done or 100% done.

C) Track down and adjust these metrics constantly, so that you are continuously getting data about the their accuracy.

Lastly, some insights about Pair Programming. PP is valuable to the industry because it has a solid physiological justification: even when programming alone, one works both with the logical / analytical part-oriented view of the problem (left-brain activity) and the intuitive / synthesizing / whole-oriented view (right-brain). So PP is merely an externalization of these two ways of approaching an assignment, with two programmers switching roles to act as the "left brain" or the "right brain" interchangeably.

All in all, an enlightening and valuable talk rooted in considerable industry experience.

Intuitivity Rules

Wed. 4 Nov 2009 15:43:50 GMT

Speaking as a pro-techie non-techie, the more intuitive the application the better. Stopping over at the Microsoft booth to check out their latest device – the Surface – you’ll find its interface goes a loooong way towards delivering a foolproof tool for digital interaction. Mostly it’s pretty fun.

Here for you

Wed. 4 Nov 2009 18:02:40 GMT

A bunch of the session speakers were just raving about the smoothness of the conference and the quality of the content – but they’re wondering where everyone’s questions are in the sessions. Hey gang, don’t be afraid to raise your hand, get in there, and ask 'em what you wanna know.