Gerd’s Blog

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.

Today I have arrived at the JAOO conference in Aarhus. I am visiting the conference with a good friend of my Rupert. On the bus form the airport to the town we met with Rajeev Dayal one of the Google GWT Developers. He will held a Talk about “Building Large Applications with GWT 1.4″ on Thursday. After we arrived at the hotel we went to lunch together and spoke about working for Google developing the GWT, Rich client applications for the Browser and several other things very interesting things. He gave us some information how development is done by Google and I have to say I now understand much better why things like the blog search issue I mentioned in one of my last postings can happen there.

Right now I am sitting in my hotel room and looking at the schedule for tomorrow. The opening Keynote will be held by Robert C. Martin and the Party Keynote by  Charles Simonyi. In the evening there is the Conference Party so hopefully I will find time to post about the talks before the it starts.

Today I want to post about something different than software development. Yesterday I found the Video about Rand Pausch’s last lecture and was really impressed. It was not about a person that still has fun living even knowing that he will die, further more about a university professor that dedicated his live teaching students to reach their child hood dreams.

A full version is also available.As some of you might know I am still studying Computer Science at the TU Vienna. I started in 2000 and no I was not just studying the last 7 years. In September 2002 I decided to work full time and this is what I am doing until now. Therefore my progress at the University is not as fast as expected.

There are several reasons for starting to work full time but one of the biggest was that studying was more a burden than a pleasure and I do not mean it in an hey lets go out and have fun way. After nearly seven years at the TU including several years working as Tutor, I have to say there is and was no Professor who fascinated me in any lecture he gave to aim for the stars in a way the talk above does. There was neither a person I would

There was one sentence in the full video that fascinated me most:
When he got his PhD his Professor told to him that he is an excellent seller and he should use this technique to sell something more valuable than any product of the world - he should sell education.

We are complaining that skilled, enthusiastic developers are so hard to find but forget that they have not learn it. Not in school an not at the university. Where are the Mentors the Rand Pauschs that can captivate students with their words?

Probably most of you know I am currently working for SENACTIVE and we are developing an Complex Event Processing System Called InTime in C#. Yesterday I had a meeting with an potential customer and he was asking what our platform target is. I said it is Windows as we are developed in C# and until now Mono does not support everything we need from the CLR. He was complaining about C# because he gave it a try a few years ago and was not satisfied and all their applications are running on Linux/UNIX. I found an interesting analogy that at least everyone that likes Winter sports can understand.

The opinions of JAVA and .net are similar to them of skiers and snowboarders. If you just try one of them you don’t like the others because they are different and you just see the bad things. If you are trying both of them you know about their advantages and disadvantages find both attractive.

It is really interesting that languages and Runtime environments still matter today or at least people are concerned about it.

In one of Alister Cockburns last posts he was writing about Using RUP to fix Scrum. As i read his small article one sentence attracted my attention. He wrote: The pendulum has swung too far from “too much planning” to “not enough understanding”. I have the same feeling for some time now. The picture on the left shows a typical iterative scrum process where the backlogs on the left side are used to add features to a new iteration. What’s interesting is that more and more people and companies try to hold the Product Backlog as small as possible and push new features directly into sprints. So what is bad with this approach you would ask?

The backlog was intended as a place where ideas can grow. I never have seen Stories/Features that can be developed as they are written in the Backlog. In my Opinion this happens because most of the people involved don’t have or take the the time to think about the feature that should be implemented. A short cycle to develop new features should be aimed but not for every price. There are some other aspects that need to be considered and one of is that people must understand the product they are developing.

The second issue I have seen with short Product Backlogs is that Release Planing suffers. If you do not have enough Stories in your backlog to plan for the next release you will ship everything breaks down. In this moment everybody in the Team looses the goal for the Product. I would compare it with a scene from Forrest Gump where he starts to run without any goal. This is not working in reality.

There are three lessons I have learned in the last three years in reference to the issues I mentioned above:

1. Never start any sprint without a goal
2. Never start a product development without an Release Plan
3. Try to discuss Stories/Features as soon as possible with a bigger group of people

As most of you will know Google Reader finally got a search function. I proposed such function also in an last post about Meta RSS feeds so at least for me it was no surprise. After so long time the feature I waited for was finally available so I started to do some demo queries. Searching for some words delivered really good search results. Then I started to try some of the more complex queries like searching for links or using the “site:” operator. None of the advanced operators worked. I really have not expected that and it looked to me they have done a new search engine just for the reader instead of using the old one that does already search for blog entires.

Today they posted an article in the goolgesystem blog with a few tips how to search for stuff in the reader which really makes me think. Why do we need a How to for a search if all the other different content searches (web, news, blogs) can be done with the same query syntax? Why they have invented the wheel again and done an new search engine just for the reader? Is Google getting to big? I do not know until now but it reminds me about several other big companies that are making this mistake over and over again.

Several weeks ago i posted about “Making JIRA a little more agile“. Today I found a Company called Green Pepper Software that has developed a product called Green Hopper which extends JIRA with stuff that is more common in the agile world than the list views the product provides out of the box.

They added an very intuitive Dash board for planing releases and a possibility to generate Burn down charts. In comparison with Mingle I have to say that i would prefer Green Hopper. Mingle is just an agile project management tool, JIRA was original invented as Bug Tracking Tool but can be extended with Green Hopper to an project management tool. The second advantage of JIRA is that there are thousands of other Plugins available and you have the possibility to write some of them on your own.

As web applications get used international the need to translate them into several languages gets bigger and bigger. Google describes in on of their last blog entries how proud they are to support 170+ Laguages for some of their applications. They even try to include the community to do translation on their own.

Everyone understands the need for translation of the services to provide the services to persons in their own language. The question is how to find out the right language for the current user. There are several ways:

1. Use the browser default Language
2. Let the user decide which language to use
3. Use the location of the request to choose a language

Google as many other services decided to use the third of the above options. Let me explain why i do not think that is an good idea.

I travel at least once a month to Hungary for a weekend because my girlfriend comes from there. Last week we spent several days there. I used the time to change my blog to WordPress as already described in my last posting. As i was playing araound with Blogger i noticed several of the following Screens:

Believe me i try to learn speak hungarian but the language is very difficult to learn so I understand not really very much of the information Blogger gave me. My browser is configured to use English (en) as my default language.

I can not understand why Google simple ignores the browser configuration and just guesses the language out of the location I surf from.

I am still on vacation so i used Thursday to move my blog as described in my last post. As already mentioned i preferred WordPress so i gave it try on www.wordpress.com one of the free hosted site. Already the first impressions where grate i played around a little bit and felt very comfortable with the interface and the functionality that was provided. So I started to search how i can transfer the old posting and comments. At http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/05/move-blogger-to-wordpres i found an article how this can be done easily. WordPress supports an importer for several sources and Blogger is one of them. So i tried it an after a few minutes the content was transfered. I was very impressed how easy this part worked.

After i had finished the first import i tried to set up the http://blog.gerd-saurer.com domain to my hosted WordPress log. Unfortunately i could not register a CNAME entry so i decided to install my own WordPress instance on the server. After an hour everything was working and I searched and installed the most important Plugins (FeedBurner, Google Analyticator, …). Then began the most complicated part - finding an template that fits your needs. I found one but as so much of them it was optimized for 800×600 screens. I do not believe anyone is surfing with this solution any more so I changed it to an 1024×768. I hope you like the Theme.

No it was time to change all important tracking tools from the old to the new instance. First i changed my domain settings for blog.gerd-saurer.com at my provider. I created an new FeedBurner feed to track the old Blogger instance feed and changed the URL of the original post and comment feeds to the new WorPress instance. When this was finished i activated the Analytic settings and finally posted on my old blog my last message with an information that this will be the last message that is published on this blog and that everyone that receives this message via an RSS reader should update the feed URL.

Finally I tried to set up a mechanism to redirect people accessing my blog directly to the new one. You can find a nice HowTo at http://laffers.net/howtos/howto-redirect-blogger-to-wordpress.

It took me nearly one day to switch my whole blog. If it would have been possible to use the WordPress service hosted I think half a day would have bean enough. Everything was easy and straight forward. I hope the decision to move to WordPress was right.

Once again I apologies for the troubles the the moving had cause you but finally as you read this post you have switched successfully. I am looking forward for interesting posting and comments in the future.

I was using blogger since 2 months now and i have to admit that it is far no that usable as i thought. Today i decided to move my blog including the content to an other tool. I think i will shift to WordPress but i have not made the final decision. The domain http://blog.gerd-saurer.com and the RSS Fees for the Blog and the Comments will stay as they are.
I apologies for the troubles this will cause you. Until now i really was very satisfied with the Google Products but Bloggers is far not that i expected.

If you are interested what was the crucial factor for my decision:
A few hours ago i posted my Post Titled “Google Reader Feeds” which was original an older draft version about a month old. As i posted it i did not recognize that the publish date was set to the original date the draft was created. This is not what i expected because it was published today and not about a month ago. I tried to change the date but the only thing i go was an error that i should publish something at the bloggers google group. I searched there and found several entries already more than a year old - no comment when it will be solved.