Walking on the Wrong Side of the Street

The first time I ever went to Sydney, Australia, I couldn't get in sidewalk sync. It seemed like every time I walked down the sidewalk, I was walking head-long into groups of people. It was almost like I was swimming upstream. Then it dawned on me: these folks are used to driving on the left-hand side of the road, so they tend to walk on the left-hand side of the sidewalk too. Suddenly, it made sense, and my sidewalking skills improved overnight.

The same thing occurred to me this morning while I was walking from my hotel to the offices in ThoughtWorks India, and I noticed that everyone here (also being a former British colony) walks and drives on the left-hand side. Which side you tend towards when walking is one of those intrinsic, automatic things that you don't even realize is part of your cultural literacy until you go somewhere where it's the opposite.

The same kind of automatic response happens when developing software. I span the Java and .NET worlds, and I think it's interesting to see the kinds of cultural ticks that programmers from specific platforms develop. For example, in the Java world, you build frameworks for everything. In the .NET world, you organize things around the limitations of namespaces and solution files in Visual Studio, because it's the only real choice when it comes to IDEs. I have an advantage because I live part time in both worlds, so I try to spot cultural eccentricities whenever I sense myself walking on the wrong side of the street. Some things make sense in both cultures (like unit testing), while others are little more than arbitrary cultural baggage.

Dynamic Typing in the Strangest Places

One of my favorite things in college was the accidental synergy that happened between the collection of classes taken in a single quarter. Sure, compiler theory and automata match one another, but it's even more interesting when a history and computer science class find ways to complement one another. I get some of the same type of cross-pollination of ideas when speaking at conferences -- some of the topics end up complementing each other in odd ways.

It happened recently in St. Louis at No Fluff, Just Stuff. Part of the weekend, I was talking about how document centric messaging in SOA avoids endpoint versioning headaches. Later in the weekend, I was talking about the flexibility afforded by dynamic languages and their loose typing. Then, it occurred to me: SOA and the document centric approach is really just another version of dynamic or loose typing. If you free the plumbing from having to know what types you are passing (in this case, just a blob of XML), you create a more flexible system, able to withstand changes more gracefully. Just like with dynamic languages.

I've been sauteing in this idea for a while: we are building the same kind of application right now on the project I'm on. And, even though it's written in .NET 2, we take advantage of loose typing in the transport layer, which ultimately makes for a more robust application. How do we handle catching version conflicts? The way you should handle all such situations: unit testing. Loose typing + unit testing provides the same security you get with strongly typed languages but much more flexibility

Finally, An Accurate Representation of My Graphical Skills

During a lunchtime conversation today, because of the specific context, I came up with a great quote about my abilities as a graphical designer:

Graphical design is like pornography: I know it when I see it, I don't want to participate in it, and you don't want to see me try it either.

'Nuff said.

A Dearth of Fluff, Significant Stuff

As my regular reader(s?) must have noticed, I've been very quiet for a while. No, I haven't given up pontificating; I've been working diligently on a new year of No Fluff, Just Stuff presentations. Every year, I cull some of my old talks from the herd and send them to the virtual glue factory and add some new, spry colts to the fold. This year, I've added about 4 new talks and killed the same number, and I've been spending the last couple of months getting them in shape. This last weekend was the debut of a couple of them (along with 5 of my existing talks).

No Fluff, Just Stuff Gateway Software Symposium occurred in St. Louis over the weekend. I gave a total of 7 talks: clean Up Your Code, Advanced Enterprise Debugging Techniques, SOA & ESB: The Future of Distributed Computing or the Return of the Son of CORBA?, Pragmatic XP, the new Testing with Selenium, the also new The Productive Programmer, and finally Language-oriented Programming and Language Workbenches. Whew! It was a long weekend, but the new talks turned out well (only requiring minor tweaks, not major overhauls). And, someone was nice enough to blog about one of my talks (always good to get feedback).

It's great to get back to No Fluff. Many of the speakers are good friends, so it's good to see them again. One of the speakers made an excellent observation that also applies to me: I have more friends that travel the country every weekend than I do at home! It's good to be back in the saddle again.