Roots 2011 braindump I

I'm here at the Roots 2011 conference in Bergen and the program is packed with wonderful stuff. So I thought I'd venture into liveblogging/core dumping the interesting stuff I see.

A Way North!

Dan North kicked of the ball with the opening keynote titled Patterns of Effective Delivery and North is entertaining as always. He outlined several patterns he has observed which goes against a lot of conventional wisdom in the agile world. Like starting writing a test named "public void testBlah()" and just start coding. And then renaming it later on when you see if the code is worth keeping. Or starting a new piece of code by copying and pasting (Ginger Cake Pattern). And possibly refactor out common pieces much later, when you see where the code is taking you. All in all a great talk and I will dig deeper into Dan's findings. The keynote will be online in video form later if all goes well, too. 

Jim Webber: Rest in Practice

Jim Webber, Chief scientist for Neo Technologies, makers of fine graph databases, was next with a 1 1/2 hour rant on SOA and REST. In short. SOA sucks, REST is good, which is hard to disagree with. And a lot of colourful English idioms was picked up during the talk as well. Great fun, but a bit lacking in nutritional content, perhaps.

Lightning Round!

Lots of small gems here, too long to go in depth on all of them. Johannes Brodwallstarted off with a talk on how to be an agile architect with some nice tips. Andreas Heim talked about virtualizing your development environment for a more rapid startup and better control over your infrastructure, using vagrant, chef/puppet/linger. After that Filip Van Laenen talked about outsourcing self-discipline to the computer and running stuff such as static code analysis metrics as a part of your development process. Interesting take! The first session was rounded of be total geekery on GPU-accelerating normal apps using NVidia CUDA processors.

Second Round

Second slot was the track on continuous delivery, started off by Stein Inge Morisbak on version control branching strategies for making rapid/continuous delivery possible. Followed by his colleague Ole-Christian Rynning on techniques for automation and delivery: promote binaries, create built-in health checks and let the team deploy. Then there was me talking about deployment pipelines in Jenkins (slides can be found on slideshare.net) and the session was rounded off by Mario Aparicio on facts and speculation about NoSQL. After doing quite a bit with of work with various NoSQL databases, I found that last one to be a bit shallow and lacking.

Third Round

Third round was a fantastic talk by @anoras (Anders Norås) on the notion that we are to busy sharpening the saw/following the next trend to get things done. And even getting things done is a trend. He rounded off by handing out certification documents certifying all in the audience as Bul Shi artists, an ancient Japanese technique. Great fun. Thommy Bommen followed up with a really nice talk on be a responsible person in life and in work, which was followed by a meta-talk on automating lightning talks and getting people to give them inside your own company. Another fine talk by Eirik Bjørsnøs. Last talk was Ellen D. Varsi on hitting the nail on the head and finding the right abstractions for software and getting it right.

Open Spaces

The open spaces didn't work as well as I have grown accustomed to at Smidig. I think a lot of people went home before them. So few ideas and small groups, but it turned out OK. First slot i used to hack on couchDB replication (dead simple and cool) and CouchApp with a few of the local bergen couch mafia. Good fun. Last slot was the question of are we doing to much automated testing through the GUI. It turned into testing strategies and at the end Dan North popped up and joined too.

And then there was beer and music...