Speaking at Expo-C
April 25, 2006
I am lucky enough to have been invited to present at Expo-C, a software architecture conference based in Carlskrona, Sweden. The dates are 16th to 19th May 2006.
At the risk of dropping names, last year’s conference included sessions by the likes of Rod ‘Spring’ Johnson, Rickard Oberg and Jimmy Nilsson, and this year’s line-up includes, well, take a look for yourself.
In a moment of insanity, the organisers have given me a whole day to play with, the Tuesday, – so I’ll be running a number of sessions with an agile theme, rounded off with a retrospective. I’m going to see how little PowerPoint I can get away with. I’m aiming for Zero Slides.
The rest of the conference is packed with seminars, a panel session, tutorials and they’ve even squeezed in some Open Spaces. A small conference that looks like being a lot of fun – spaces are strictly limited and apparently Carlskrona is beautiful at this time of year.
Ruby session at ACCU 2006
April 21, 2006
From the session summary
bq. The Ruby language has taken the development world by storm. Its combination of clean, object-oriented syntax (everything is an object) coupled with Perl-like platform independence and inline text processing power make it a useful tool both for writing small utilities and as a rapid prototyping language. The popular web framework, Ruby-on-Rails, allows for easy development of highly-functional web applications.
bq. This session will explore these aspects of Ruby, namely for utilities, prototyping and web development. We will also discuss issues such as scalability and deployment.??
bq. Intended audience: experienced developers who are curious about what Ruby has to offer, and want a fair appraisal and introduction without all the hype.??
I promise there will be no powerpoint and lots of interactive stuff.
What's so hard about Event-Driven Programming?
April 9, 2006
I was lucky enough to attend the Software Architecture Workshop in Cortina recently. It was a three day workshop based around the idea of Open Spaces, which involves handing the asylum keys to the inmates and seeing what happens.
I convened a session called “What’s so hard about Event-Driven Programming?” to explore the experiences of the other delegates in designing, implementing and testing asynchronous, event- or message-driven systems. I took the position that actually it was all very straightforward as long as you followed a few basic principles. Another delegate, Mats Helander, took the opposing view that asynchronous, event-based systems could develop scary emergent behaviour that would lead to a world of hurt.
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