Gerd’s Blog

I just fond the photo form 1921 in one of my news feeds and thought about some other pictures I saw about demonstrations in the past. Don’t get me wrong I don’t want to say that everything was better in the past.

Demonstration 1921:

Demonstration 2007:

© Timo Vogt / www.randbild.de

I wonder what has changed?

I was posting about the JAOO 2007 several time ago and would like to share an other experience i had there. On Monday I had lunch with Wayne Fenton from ebay where he explained their deployment strategy to me.

The concept they use is very easy but if you take a closer look it fits perfect into an agile website world. The whole strategy is based on the concept of trains. Trains are going every two weeks to the website and have only a couple of seats left. Think about seats in the manner of complexity which makes sense to reduce the complexity of the deployment to a oversee able amount. Every team can decide which train they would like to catch. If they have decided to take one, they have to ensure that every required QA is done until departure. If they can’t finish their work - there will be an other train in two weeks. After the train started it’s way to the website there is an other QA done before the deployment goes life to the portal.
Deployment is done in three Phases. First of all the Databases are updated if they need to. The second phase deploys the new version on the application servers. important here is that no new feature is enabled while the deployment. After all servers have the new version the system starts to enable the new features. It is important that for every deployment step there must be the possibility to role back to the old state.
With this strategy one server farm after the other is switched to the new version. Internationalized versions of their platform role out the new versions normally about one to two months later. In the end this results in nearly 24/7 deployment in the production environment. For me this strategy is really impressive and I would like to see such a deployment in real.

Yesterday I was out with two friends and we talked a lot about the computer industry. Of course on of the topics we discussed was the social web we are living at the moment. I mentioned that we have to maintain several profiles on the different social sites and that it would be nice to have just one centralized profile where you can decide which information goes to which channel. Of course Google did some step in this direction about two months ago when they introduced Open Social but for me the ’standard’ they introduced is far away form what we need. After some discussion we identified two main fields we need to have in the future to be able to maintain just one profile and distribute the information.

1. Authentication
   There need to be a mechanism for Single Sign on to different Social Sites. I mentioned OpenId some posts ago which would provide such functionality
2. Centralized Data Management
   At the moment User don’t care that there information is distributed over several Sites and Content providers but if you have to maintain more than one profile (e.g. you change your job or your hometown) things become difficult. First of all you don’t remember all the sites you signed up for but believe me some of your friends will and will complain that the couldn’t find the information that you have changed your job. On the other hand maintaining your profile is fare to much work (in my opinion).

An other important point for centralized data is that you can’t trust ever provider to take care of your data. And some have build up amazing profiles on websites they don’t want to loose. The amusing part here is that I read about this issues we discussed yesterday in an posting from Robert Scoble about ‘Facebook disabled my account‘. Of course they just disabled the account and he will get his profile back, I’m sure about it, but in the end there can be situations where you will not. The nice thing about it is that he point’s in his post to DataPortability.org an community that tries to use protocols and ’standards’ out there to give user the possibility to use an system I described above.

Let’s see what the future will bring, I am just tired to maintain my profiles:

Blog, Website, Xing, Google Profile, Facebook, StudiVZ, …..

I was reading the last blog entry form the Official Google Blog and was a little bit supprised what google is plaing now. They are trying to provide some knowledge base where user can contribute content and discuss it. I think this concept is not new and nearly eveyone knows a site wikipedia that tries to solfe this problem alrady and does it very well in my oppinion.
Google was growing very fast in the last decade and where they invest there is nearly no space for any competitor. Take Google Analytics as an example. Until now Google alway says don’t be evil and as far as we can see it they aren’t. Never the less this situation can change easily in the future. Exactly this situation is discussed very loudly in the community. Going into a direct competition with wikipedia isn’t a very good idea in my oppinion. Several people believe in the project and i would say love it. Just evil person try to “destroy” someone you love.

I was a big fan of google and it’s projects/services never the less I’m also sceptical about using some services. For example I never used Gmail as my primary mail system or Checkout the not so much known payment system they offer. I think they should not know everything about me. On the other hand i use the search history, analytics and several other services.

As I mentioned in one of my last posting titled Location != Language, I do not like the idea Google chooses the language to present it’s website to us. At least the web search was using the default US - site until last week. Since then I always got the localized search results which are not appropriate for me special if I am searching for computer science stuff. I needed some solution to fix this so after searching a little bit I step over an interesting posting. In the end there was a solution for my problem: “Meanwhile, if you want to use the standard version of Google, click on “Google.com in English” at the bottom of any Google homepage or type google.com/ncr in your address bar. Google’s cookie will save your preference, so the next time you go to google.com you won’t be redirected to the local version.“

I tried it and it works perfect. Just enter “google.com/ncr” once and the cookie will do the rest for you. Hopefully this help some of you to get better search results in the future. I have not found a solution for the other Google services e.g. Bloggers but maybe there will be one in the future.

Yesterday I finished the Scrum Master training and I have to say that I am a little bit disappointed. Our trainer went to some other issues of the scrum process itself but as yesterday there was nothing really new to me.
At the end of the course we did the Velocity Game with about 90 participants split into 15 groups. They gave us User Stories for the Product backlog e.g find one missing card in a deck of cards and we as a team had to estimate them first. Afterwards every team had to choose an Productowner which was me in ours. He sorted the product backlog in an way he likes the team to do the work. Every Story had an business value and of course the Product owner has to care to get the highest out of his group. After everything was set up the team was asked to estimate their velocity. Then the the team had to solve the User Stories in an given amount of time like a Sprint in Scrum. When the work was finished every group found their actual velocity, new User Stories where handed out and everything started from the beginning.
I really liked the game because everyone got an feeling how it will work in real life. Special in our group this was not new to most of us but it was fun. In the end there was no test like for other Certifications and we all passed.

If you wonder why I am posting this in the very early morning 5:30 ECT. This is an really funny story (at leas in the end). I left from Aarhus as planed by bus to the Airport. In the bus there where several participants from the JAOO conference so we had the chance to talk a little bit about our experiences. As I arrived at airport check in the nice woman told me that I am not allowed to check my luggages through to the flight to Vienna. I only had 40 minutes to reached the next flight to Vienna and as some of you might know the International Terminal in Copenhagen is about 1km away from the local one. So I already felt that it will be hart to catch it. So I went to the boarding area and surprise surprise - 30 minutes delay. Now it was clear that I will never catch the next flight. I came to Copenhagen Airport with about 1 hour delay. The thin that was nice about it was that Eric Evans was on the same flight and we had time for an retrospective on JAOO 2007. As I arrived on the Airport everything started getting complicated. As I booked the flights separately. There where big troubles getting my flight changed to an other one. Finally they did it, maybe also because I have a Miles & More Card. So my flight is going in about an hour therefor I stayed at the airport the whole night. For me it is really interesting how the airports are designed. There drink automates only take cash which is a little bit tricky because if you just arrive you normally may not have DKK. The Chairs in the Transfer Terminal and over the whole airport are just a little bit to small that you can take a sleep. Internet is just free because the JAOO account is also works here. So there is a lot of stuff Airport Planers may consider if they would have been in an situation like me before they design the airport.

So I have just returned from the first day of the Certified Scrum Master Class. Our Trainer is Gabrielle Benefield. First of course we had to introduce our self and I was impressed because most of the people in the room had already knowledge about Agile Processes and in particular about scrum. She started with some introduction and after that it was up to us which particular part of the process we wanted to dig deeper into. First the participants wanted to know more about estimating so we did some card estimation game and it was really funny and also astonishing that all five teams came up with nearly the same estimates.
After lunch Gabrielle talked about which planing should be done including Vision, Road map and Release Plan and all the roles that are involved in the process and step deeper into how we can Track the Progress.
There was nothing really new to me in the calss until now and I also don’t think there will come some tomorrow. This is not bad the much more interesting stuff are the discussions with the participants and some Retrospectives what worked and what did not for them. I do not think Gabrielle had a class that was already that familiar with the process until now so when I spoke with her after the class she was really amazed about it.

At least the Scrum Master Class reminded me that maybe we stepped a little bit to far from the original scrum process in our company. I will have to think a little bit about this but as it looks to me until now we should take a step back. I think the time for doing so is perfect at the moment as we are starting some kind of bigger refactoring and advancement for the InTime suite.

Today was the last conference day for JAOO 2007 and I will visit the Scrum Master Class for the next to days. No Keynote today so even Track Host Frank Buschmann was a little bit confused and came to late to open his Track. Never the less the first speaker was Wayne Fenton the Director of Architecture form eBay. As I posted I met him already the first day at the Conference Party. He spoke about Operational Scalability and how scalability is on of the big requirements for his company. His talk was quit interested because he gave an overview how eBay reached the goal that their system scales very well. He explained a little bit about their production line and how they are doing deployment which I will post about soon.
The second Talk was given by Robert S. Hanmer about Fault Tolerance once again in the Architecture Quality Panel. Robert is working for Alcatel-Lucent where he developed Software that helps to achieve 99.999% of availability by designing fault tolerant systems. The systems need a possibility to detect faults. If they have detected one they are using different strategies form simple reinitialization up to whole reboots to bring the system as fast as possible back to a working state.
After lunch, which is a little bit to South African like for me this year, Kevlin Henney talked about Performance Art. The main message was that Performance matters in every system but as one person said at the end - It does not matter what Kevlin is speaking about, his talks are just great.
The last Talk I visited this day was by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock about Lessens Learned in architecture. She is an consultant and had the chance to see several different architectures. It was interesting that she spoke not that much about the architectures it self further more how she is dealing with the challenges in projects as consultant.
At the end there was an Panel Discussion. What I take from it is normally the design or architecture of a product is not bad at the beginning. I mean nobody want to build a system he cant extend and maintain in the future. Further more there is a leak in communication so that developers do not understand the architecture and therefore the the code gets to a big ball of mud. There was one quite interesting comment form a guy of the audience. He admitted that they are doing architecture documentation on small movies. Several on the panel and I like the idea. I have to try it out.
The finishing panel was held as Podiums Discussion by Martin Fowler, Diana Larsen, Erik Dörnenburg, Erik Meijer and Eric Evans. They did some retrospective on the conference and what they fascinated them.

At the end I have to say the three conference days of JAOO 2007 where grate. I had a lot of fun and learned several new things. I am just wondering why we got no Conference T-Shirt this year but at leas everyone got a bag. So, now I will go out with Rupert for some beer to discuss the last two days a little bit. I am really thinking if I will come to this conference next year again. Definitely it is the best i have ever been to, but lets see maybe we will be able to do something like the JAOO in Vienna for the next Year.

Yesterday there was day to at the JAOO 2007. The Keynote was held by Eric Maier who presented his vision of programming in the future. The presentation was about bringing all the bloody code away from the Programmer. With bloody code he means code that has nothing to do for solving the current project.
The first talk of this day was by  Jean Bezivin who talked about model transformation At the beginning he started explaining Models Meta-Models and al the theoretical stuff that in my opinion most of us already know. This part was a little bit boring. In the second Part he was switching to the Eclipse Model Discovery project they are doing the transformation with. The presented stuff was quit interested, the presentation technique was like a professor at the university (see one of my last postings).
After lunch we went to  Eric Evans talk about  strategic design. His conclusion was that you have to find your main model and build your business around it. I was thinking about the main model of the system we are currently developing - maybe I should spend a little bit more effort on this in the future.
Next talk was once again by Klaus Marquardt, this time more technical then the last one. He was talking about Complexity Management in projects. His conclusion was that you have to be very careful with KPI’s Management are requesting.
Joseph Yoder spoke about The Adaptive Object-Model which was quite interesting because we use this technique for our Event Processing Engine too. Our Event Object Types are definitions of the Event Objects that are the runtime container for Events - the objects send through the system.
The last Talk at this day was a more practical one held by Jimmy Nilsson & Kim Harding Christensen about LINQ for Domain Driven Design. I know LINQ for some time now it was just nice to see how other people solve problems with it. At the end one of the Developers of LINQ had a small discussion with the two speakers why some stuff was build in the way it is now and which trade offs they had to agree to.
After all tat there was a so called “Sun-Keynote” which was more or less an marketing event form Matt Thompson and one Sun developer I even don’t remember his name. They showed some examples with JAVA Me and Sun SPOTS. I didn’t like tat kind of marketing events titled as Keynote.
In the Evening there was an other new Event called Jam Session. There where some pizza, beer and wine and several speaker and visitors played music. We met some smart people including Jimmy Nilsson. We were speaking about the situation in Software Development in Austria and that there is no conference like the JAOO in Central Europe. He asked if we are planing to do something against this. I am really thinking about this since last year I have been to JAOO. Lets see if we can do this.

Yesterday was Day one of the conference and was really interesting. Everything started as last year we got a nice little bag with all the stuff you need at an conference. Just one thing was much better this year, I had no problems getting my batch.
The morning keynote was held by Robert C. Martin and he is a really good speaker. At the beginning he was rising the question if software engineering is already a profession and appealed to every developer to write better and cleaner code. He is wearing a green band on his left arm for about 3 years now because it reminds him to do so.
The second talk we where attending was by Charles Simonyi about “Democratizing Software Creation” which was really fascinating. His company is developing an language to describe other languages which you can imagine is not that easy. The talk was given in combination with one person form Capgemini who showed an demonstration of an DSL generated within their language. I am still a little bit sceptical if this is really working the way they showed it and wanted us to believe it does.
Organically Agile was the Talk by Klaus Marquardt who is working for Dräger Medical. The purpose of his talk was that even life critical systems can be developed within agile methods.
Lex Spoon did an talk on Scala an language that is very interesting. The language combines Functional and Object oriented concepts and I would like to take a closer look on it in the near future.
Gilad Bracha is working on a language called Strongtalk which is used to build an Executable grammar. The exciting part here is that Lexer and Parser can be easily extended because of flexible concepts like mixins that Smaltak provieds.
The last talk before the Party Keynote was by Andreas Zeller and titled Beautiful Debugging. He presented his Ideas written in the Book Beautiful Code. The book as the talk I can only recommend you.

Party Keynote was given by Robert C. Martin again . He was speaking about the Space flight he did this year. The Pictures he showed where just amazing special the ones taken at the ISS. Take a look at www.charlesinspace.com to get some of the expressions we where able to see.
After the Keynote there was the Conference Party as last year. We met some people there e.g Joe Hummel, Wayne Fenton and Roy Osherove, all three are speakers at the Jaoo. We had some nice conversation special Wayne Fenton spoke a little bit about who Ebay does roll-out. I will make an other posting about that later.