Second day of Roots 2011 is over and here are my highlights:

The 7 Duties

Opening keynote of the day was Jurgen Appelo with a talk on the 7 duties of a software professional. Basically how and why you should work on improving yourself in every aspect: motivating yourself, direct yourself, connect yourself (to others), measure yourself and so on. A previously recorded version of this talk, with jokes about the Germans instead of the Swedes is on the internet. All in all a great talk and nice advice for moving forward instead of standing still in your life and career.

Graph Goodness

After that came Jim Webbers Neo4j hacking tutorial by going through (some of) the neo4j koans koans to get a feel for the neo4j API and how to program it. Didn’t have time to cover a whole lot, but I will try to go through the rest of Koans back home. I have used Neo4j a bit earlier, but I want to get the feel of it in a larger context and use the API more thoroughly.

Secrets of Agile Architecture

Dan North was on once again after lunch with a talk on Secrets of Agile Architecture. He was all over the map talking about topics such as treating organisations as systems and how changing the architecture changes the organisation, managing impact instead of obsessing about likelihood of options and choices. Conway’s law and Dan’s corollary to it, Real Options, PDCA, the role of the architect as a minstrel in modern software development and much much more. Dan is never short on ideas. Some cognitive overload happened there and I need some time to digest all the ideas. Nice talk.

HAML And SASS

Anders Norås then again took over with a tuturial on using HAML and SASS for writing web applications. Great intro and kudos for creating usb sticks with virtual image with pre-installed software. I have used these two technologies a bit before but I joined anyway to pick up some new tricks. Nothing revolutionary there, but a nice reminder that I use it to seldom in daily life. Need to prioritize my rails projects now that the talk for Roots is out of the way.

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Published

24 May 2011

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