I already use Jungle Disk which is the amazon S3 (simple storage service). But this talk went through the entire set of services, giving enough insight into each to provoke thought, as to potential uses. Of great interest to me was the Elastic compute cloud, allowing for fast scalability and setup, with a time, bandwidth and computing power pricing model. The up and coming Simple DB, an object database looked very interesting.
I think that Eric is a good speaker and the Eclipse project is interesting,but was it worthy of a keynote slot? I say this as it ended up as more of a product pitch for Jazz, which looked good in one way, but only if you are going to base your team around it, and i believe that there are inherent risks there; integration with eclipse scares me off. I believe its getting more to a stage where you find teams picking an ide/tools based on the problem space i.e netbeans mobile and profile tools are excellent. Therefore, opting for an integrated jazz type product ends up reducing choice.
I was not quite sure what to pick today, after almost going for Java Performance i opted for the Agile route. The session was not quite what i expected from the title or excerpt, but still very enjoyable. David Anderson came at agile almost from the standpoint of standard problem software projects. He looked at how these could be edged towards the agile world through clear identification of the value stream (process) and the examination of metrics around this. His key take outs that quality should be the focus and reducing the work in progress (WIP) leads to efficiency: in effect shorter cycles or sprints work far better than large batches of work. Having concentrated on agile methodologies, this viewpoint of how to get to agile inspired lots of thought; it is often the case that a covert agile approach must be followed, where a full and open method such as Scrum, cannot be taken.
My favourite comment from David ‘ the sign of a poorly managed department is one where the manager is always complaining of being busy’ this leading to a lack of change; see my previous post on the book Slack, which this comment ties into nicely.
written on my N810, so please excuse grammar and spelling
My last five conferences had been in San Francisco, so the howling winds and buckets of rain which destroyed my umbrella did not put me in the best, or driest of moods. However, i had registered for DSL with Martin Fowler, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons, so i held hope. They did not disappoint, presenting a work in progress for a new book that covered Internal, External and Language Workbench definitions of DSL.
While DSL have been around for many years, this attempt at clarification, was clear and well thought out. The definition :
The easiest entry point seemed to be Internal DSL (those created within your current language of choice, or by investigating and branching out into other complementary languages External DSL’s, i.e Groovy or JRuby to complement Java. A potentially more difficult External DSL’s route was to write your own DSL, this offering great power and control, but potential high-complexity as these are home spun definitions, lexers and parsers and this will be alien to many. Finally of great interest were Languages Workbenches, which in the case of Jetbrains MPS is a multitude of DSL’s that go together to form the MPS tool for creating DSL’s. This and other similar work has the potential to change the way we work, some are near to production quality, so we will see.
My take out was that the use of DSL’s needs to get more prominence, in a similar way to Agile development; which has taken years to gain main stream prominence. Through the use of DSL’s developers will gain skills and solve problems in a more elegant fashion, so it’s a definite win and with a Martin Fowler book on the subject it should get wider prominence.
(Written on my N810, so excuse grammar and spelling)
I have tried and tried, but, i just can’t come to grips with facebook. The only functionality i like to use is the quick updates from my blackberry, but apart from that nothing. I find the fact that my photos are held in limbo annoying, to the point at which i won’t upload and poke, hug etc are just a joke to me, i get nothing from them. I tried some apps but most seem to be based on pyramid scheme mentality. Roll on the next incarnation.
I had to empty a locked item in the trash and needed to hold the option key, nobody seemed to know it was the alt key on a mac, except one designer and wikipedia.
Iv’e just put together the first draft of a site for my wife’s uncle. Take a look it’s got some nice pitures in the gallery. www.jscudamore.com
A new service from Qik provides you with the ability to stream video to the web from your mobile phone. It currently works on most Nokia phones and has been used to good effect by Robert Scoble at Davos and Mac World. This obvious, but well implemented solution is a great extension to video just stored on your phone. how long will it be before we see it in daily news programmes with roaming citizen reporters. Well worth a try if you have a Nokia, but watch phone bill if you don’t have an unlimited data plan.
I like simple ideas and Chirp is one of them. We all have an ever growing list of social network sites and Chirp aims to bring these together in one place. The thing I like about the idea is it’s a screen saver. I think this is smarter than trying to be a web page or true desktop application, as people are more willing to try a screensaver. Also I think it may be a great time to get an update on your networks; just when you return to your machine.
At the moment it only links into Flickr and Facebook, but more are on the way. I’m not biggest fan of Facebook, but many are, so this screensaver may be popping up on a desktop near you.
I am happy to announce that my team have just launched the new Sky Travel site . It is a complete re-development form the ground up and integrates with multiple providers to provide a breath of product offerings. It has been built using open source Java technology (Tomcat, Mysql, Apache) and uses the Spring and Hibernate frameworks. The site is fully content managed and uses the open source Incendiary Blue CMS.
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