At ESUG, I gave a talk about the Glamorous Toolkit, and the talk is now online. We have announced the Glamorous Toolkit project two years ago at the same conference. On that occasion I argued that IDEs should have different properties than what typical IDEs have to offer today. Over the last two years, we introduced 4 significant tools inside Pharo, namely Inspector, Playground, Spotter, and Debugger, and in this talk I focused on how these tools can affect the way you think about programs and programming.
Please take a look, and let us know what you think.
On September 14, starting with 18:00, I will have the pleasure of giving a talk on Steering agile architecture at the GOTO Night event organized by Trifork in Zurich.
The event will also feature a Lean Coffee session with Jeff Sutherland. The event is free of charge. Please register on the event page.
On August 26, I will have the pleasure of giving a talk on Architecture as a work in progress at an event organized by the Limited WIP Society Switzerland in Zurich.
One key aspect of dealing with the Work in Progress is to visualize the queues. We have come a long way with dealing with explicit requests that come from outside. But, how do we deal with technical problems that come from within?
Let’s take the architecture of the system. It’s rather important as it can make or break your system in the long run. Of course, the agile mantra tells us that we should emerge the architecture. This sounds great, but how do we make sure it goes in the right direction?
One way to approach it is to make technical tasks explicit and put them in the same queue as the functional ones. This never really works because of two reasons: (1) business can rarely prioritize the work, and (2) it does not fit development workflows.
We argue that it is necessary to approach technical concerns differently. We still need to make them explicit, and we also need a queue. Only, it’s a different queue that is managed exclusively by the team and worked while dealing with regular tasks.
In this interactive talk we show concrete examples of how this works in practice.
Next week, on December 13, I will have the pleasure of giving a keynote and tutorial around humane assessment and Moose at the Be Fast & Curious event in Cluj, Romania.
The event is organized by 3Pillar Global. This is the first time that I am talking about these topics in Romanian, so this will actually pose a little challenge. But, considering the fact that the event poster has my head on it, I will certainly enjoy it.
If you are in the neighborhood, come and join us (the registration is free).
On October 15, I gave a lecture at the University of Bern on software assessment. The lecture was split into three parts:
an introduction on why we need to pay serious attention to software assessment,
a Moose Jazz session showing multiple live case studies, and
a concluding session on why custom tools are essential in software engineering.
The most exciting part, at least for me, was the second one. Instead of offering recounts of case studies, I showed these cases live. The cases ranged from:
multiple queries on a Java system,
parsing and analyzing a proprietary scripting language,
spotting performance problems by analyzing log files,
reasoning about development issues by querying issue tracker, and
inspecting the file system.
All of these tools were developed using Moose and they were produced in a short amount of time.
On the one hand, it’s nice to be able to show solutions to real problems live using a mature tool produced mainly by researchers. On the other hand, the very fact that all of these problems were solved with one uniform set of mechanisms attest the fact that assessment is indeed a generic skill that once learnt can be utilized in many different contexts.
At the end, I remarked that assessment is not deemed an interesting enough subject of conversation to capture the attention of engineers even though it is the most expensive and pervasive activity in software development.
So, I asked the audience if they found the demos exciting. I did not ask about interesting, I asked if they were exciting. And they all said yes.
You see, assessment is exciting. It only takes us to look at it properly.
