Friday, July 21, 2006

DSLing @ OSCON

I'm off to Portland, Oregon next week (my first ever trip to Oregon, so I can knock that off my travel map at World66), speaking at my first OSCON. I'm doing a talk on Building DSLs in Ruby, based on material that Jeremy, Joe, Zak, and I have produced for the Pragmatic Press book upon which we are working (slowly). I'm also signed up for some pre-conferecnce tutorials, including a 4 hour talk about VIM (I just had to see someone use VIM for 4 hours - I expect it to be quite impressive).

If you are in Portland, look me up. I speak on Thursday, and have some meetings on the other days, but mostly I'll be hanging around. A bunch of my No Fluff friends will also be there, so there may be some Magic games or even some Settlers of Catan.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Boy Scout Capabilities

I was having a conversation with a co-worker today whose first name prominently features the letter "Z". Our topic: how does a company like ThoughtWorks, which hires lots of experienced developers, determine at what level that person should be hired. Some candidates are cut and dried: you can tell when you interview them. But what about the developers who fall through cracks? Maybe they are an ace developer in 4 languages, but they've never done agile. Or, a great militant Agilist, but they have never done test-driven development. As a company, we need 2 things: how to categorize these folks upon hiring and, more importantly, how to fill in knowledge gaps after they arrive. After all, the ultimate goal is to create well rounded ThoughtWorkers, who are good at all the things we value highly.

In talking about this subject, I came up with the idea I called the Merit Badge approach. Just like in the Boy Scouts, when a scout moved from one troop to another, you knew their rank instantly because of the acquired merit badges. Each merit badge had deterministic acceptance criteria, and you knew that the scout in question had mastered the badge criteria before moving to the next one. A certain number of badges, covering a certain set of areas, lead to increased rank. If a company like ThoughtWorks wants all Eagle scouts, we must invest in our rookie scouts to enable them to get to that level. We should have technology merit badges. If we get a good candidate that knows everything but TDD, we should send them to a TDD training class or similar until they have mastered that skill. Advancements in the technical ranks becomes an exercise is acquiring useful skills. That keeps the process more objective and allows for clear ascension paths through the technical ranks. The People People can track the merit badges and recommend training and mentoring for the next milestone.

And, we'd all get to wear those cool sashes!

CJUG Redux

I'm speaking at the Chicago Java Users Group tonight (the Downtown one), giving my No Fluff, Just Stuff talk entitled The Productive Programmer, based on material from the book that David Bock and I are (slowly) working on for Pragmatic Press. It's completely technology agnostic, so if any .NET guys want to crash the party, feel free (sure to generate lively conversation). First-time attendees pay no dues or admission, so that makes this a really, really cheap date for you and your significant other.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Ubiqui-GPS

GPS technology has suddenly gotten really cheap, and I've taken advantage of it in 2 big ways. First, I managed to get a GPS watch from woot.com for a great price, which includes the arm-mounted GPS receiver, for urban running. It's so accurate, it provides miles per hour in real time while you are running. The other cool use of GPS is the updated version of Microsoft's Streets and Trips. This mapping software used to be nice-to-have for road warriors, now it has moved to essential because it includes a small GPS receiver. You arrive in a foreign city with only the hotel address, punch it in, and you have turn-by-turn directions, spoken via your laptop's speakers, with the traced-out route on the screen. Having Streets and Trips on a laptop is better than having one of the little Palm-sized units because a) I'm taking my laptop with me everywhere anyway and b)the screen on the laptop is much bigger and nicer. The only downside is that you've got to be within a couple of hours of your destination or have a car adaptor for your laptop.

GPS has reached the point where it is cheap, available, and plentiful. My friend Scott Davis has a nice keynote presentation at No Fluff, Just Stuff this year where he argues that location based services will be very important in the near term. The combined technologies of cheap GPS, mashup applications that leverage tools like Google maps, and the growing awareness in software of actual location suggests rich applications beyond what we've got now. If we can just get all this down to the phone level, the only thing left will be flying cars.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

EKON X

For the past 8 years, end of September has meant a trip to Frankfurt au Main, speaking at the Entwickler Conference, the premiere developer's conference in Germany. This year it has grown an additional name (EuroDevCon) but it will always be EKON to me. EKON X will kick off the last week of September. This conference and I have sort of grown up together. It used to be primarily a Borland-tool focused conference, but they have expanded the offerings to encompass all different development platforms and tools. I started at this conference way back in 1998, talking about Delphi topics. This year, I talk about SOA, Productivity (based on The Productive Programmer book), and and Agile development in .NET. Over the years, I've gradually migrated from Delphi into Java and .NET stuff.

I've done this conference so many times, it's a natural part of the year. I look forward to this great conference and my good friends in Germany, who I see only once a year. Terry and I will also be running our 5th Berlin Marathon before the conference. The happy conjunction between EKON and Berlin Marathon is great. I'm looking forward to it!

Sunday, July 09, 2006

The Persistent Persistence Question

On my current project, we faced the inevitable, persistent, annoying question of which persistence framework to use. We boiled it down to 2 choices: nHibernate or iBatis. As usual, it was not a cut-and-dried decision, as each had their strengths. nHibernate, being a meta-data mapper, writes all the annoying SQL for you, which is a huge time saver...when it can. However, when talking to complex legacy schemas, nHibernate gets tougher and tougher to configure. iBatis, on the other hand, doesn't try to generate your SQL. It just takes care of the object-relation mapping for you, from SQL you supply. That makes it much better for complex schemas, stored procedures, etc. So, which to use?

In the end, we chose both! We estimated that maintaining separate configurations would take a little time, but it would save us time on both sides: letting nHibernate do its magic when it can, and falling back to iBatis when it made more sense. It has worked out very well. We have a couple of very complex queries being handled gracefully by iBatis, and nHibernate handles all the simple persistence in the application. Sometimes, seemingly mutually exclusive options actually complement one another.