Posts Archive

I just talked to Sid Pinney and Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks, and it seems that ThoughtWorks might open an office in Sweden. That would be a welcome injection to the swedish consulting market where too many players favor quantity over quality.

I came back last night after two great days of conferencing at Smidig2007 in Oslo, Norway. The mornings where all lightning talks and the afternoons where reserved for open space discussions. I gave a lighnting talk on the experiences we have had at WeMind trying to implement a lean enterprise, and I initiated two open space sessions, one on the GUI artists role in an agile process and the other on what makes different languages have so different communities and cultures. I will expand on those in later posts.

I spent last evening at an Andy Hunt seminar organized by Valtech Sweden. Andy delivered a very good presentation on “How hard can it be” handling the topic of complexity and how we as developers often make our jobs harder than they are. Highly recommended.

I am at the SIME07 conference in Stockholm. It is is a conference focusing on entrepreneurship, media, Internet etcetera, at a pretty high level. At the conferences I normally attend people speak about what thay have done. This one has a lot of “what do you think will happen” going on.

This morning there was a very interesting panel with three venture capitalists on stage, giving feedback to three companies pitches, and VC strategy in general.

One thing that strikes me at SIME07 is how many times iPhone is mentioned. The iPhone is not even announced here in Sweden, but still people talk about it without providing any sort of context, and this is a primarily non-techie crowd. The Blackberry by comparison was available in the US for a long time before coming to Sweden, and very few people knew about it at the time. The way the iPhone is a marketing success is truly remarkable.

I have had problems compiling Vim on Leopard, and it turns out that the culprit is the built in Mac Ruby. No clue why, but when after port installing Ruby, Vim installs cleanly.

I guess I’ll have to go with MacPorts Ruby - having a working Vim beats DTrace, however cool it is.

I am subscriber of the Test Driven Development mailing list as well as the RSpec ones. One thing that strikes me continually is the lack of innovation and new ideas in the former one, as opposed to the flurry of brilliant ideas constantly coming out of the RSpec one. It seems to me that communities stagnate and that the people who once were the revolutionaries turn into keepers of their own revolutions ideas. The free thinkers become conservative.

I just read this article on distributed version control by Ben Collins-Sussman who is a lead developer behind Subversion. If I understand his arguments, he basically says that DVCS is better than centralized VCS, but you probably should not use one since 80% of all developers are too dumbfounded too understand VCS at all.

I am one of the pretentious, self-righteous and obnoxious fanboys of DVCS. And let me tell you this: the difference between using DVCS and Subversion is on par with the difference in programming in Ruby compared to Java. If you have made the switch you just do not want to go back.

I just got an email saying that my lightning talk proposal for Smidig2007 was accepted. I will speak about the experiences we have had at WeMind when trying to run a lean enterprise.

I am really looking forward to this conference, it is all lightning talks and open space.

Chatting over a beer with Ola Bini last year, we discussed the possibilities for JRuby. My dream was to run a Ruby IDE on top of JRuby to get a Smalltalk like environment, because Smalltalk is still the best programming environment I have ever used.

Now that 3rdRail, running on JRuby, is released, should I get my hopes up? Some people are actually very excited about it, but when Delphi and JBuilder are referred to as some sort of pinnacle of development it seriously makes me wonder.