europython

I just wrote a report about europython on my company blog.

Programming, History and Bletchley Park

Today at europython we listened to a keynote about Bletchley Park. This was the centre of British and allied codebreaking activities during the second world war, and where the first digital, programmable computer was built, Colossus. We heard about the current financial plight of the museum there, and the need for investment to renovate the huts that amongst others Alan Turing worked in. Dr Sue Black told us about her experiences trying to help lobby the government for more money for Bletchley park, using social networking, blogs and twitter. She recounted that she had recently met an elderly gentleman, one of the surviving codebreakers. She told us how close she felt to history when he related a story about when he was decoding a nazi message during the war, and his shock when he got to the end and discovered the message was signed “Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer”.

As a professional programmer, I think the site where the first digitally programmable computer was built has to be a place worth preserving. I hope that people will be able to visit there and see the reconstructed Colossus computer and be inspired by the stories of innovation and codebreaking that it enabled.

It was particuarly poignant for me to think about this when in the next session I checked my email and found a message from my mother saying that my grandmother died this morning. She was a living link to the history of the second world war for me. During the war she was a wireless operator, transmitting and receiving messages in morse code. And now she is not there any more. I am kind of in shock. But it just confirms for me that we need museums like the one at Bletchley Park to retain contact with our history.

(I wrote this post yesterday)

XP2009

I had a fantastic time at XP2009 in Sardinia, but I didn't find time to blog much about it until now. I just wrote a report of my TDD workshop on jsolutions.se.

Lean with lego

I'm at XP2009 this week, the sun is shining, the sea is blue and the italians are disorganized. I'm having a great time so far. This morning I was at a workshop led by Danilo Sato and Francisco Trindade - 'The lego lean game'. The idea was that we should learn about lean principles by playing with lego. I thought it was good fun, and we did learn quite a bit about pull, kanban and continuous improvement. I hope I will be able to run this simulation for some of my colleagues, I think it is a good practical way of learning using all the senses, not just reading books or listening to presentations. Much more kinesthetic.

caffeine, the science and the propaganda

I usually follow the news in the agile world on infoq, and I like the feature whereby you can listen to selected conference presentations online. This week I was making some biscuits one evening, so I took the chance to listen to Linda Rising talking about "agility: possibilities at a personal level". I have to say I was rather disappointed. I think her material was not that relevant to agile in the first place, many of her claims lacked credibility, and although the talk was superficially entertaining, it did not supply useful insights or conclusions. This provoked me into leaving a comment on the infoq site. I wonder if anyone will notice.

Europython

I'm looking forward to Europython in Birmingham at the end of June. Geoff and I are going to be rather busy at it. They've just published the programme, and between us we are holding 5 sessions. I'm running a "coder's dojo", a "clean code challenge", and Geoff and I are doing a tutorial on texttest together. Geoff is also giving talks about texttest and pyUseCase.

The coder's dojo session is a copy of the original XP2005 workshop by Laurent Bossavit and Emmanual Gaillot, only in python with different Katas. The structure is the same though - introduction, prepared Kata, randori, retrospective. I thought it worked really well in 2005, so why change a winning format?

The clean code challenge is an idea I came up with. I've written on this blog before about KataArgs, and my dodgy python translation of Bob Martin's code. I'm interested to know what the python community will make of it. I'm basically planning to throw this code out to anyone who turns up, and ask them to refactor it into better python. I'm of course hoping they will produce some innovative, beautifully pythonic solutions, and show me what clean code looks like in python.

The tutorial on texttest is essentially similar to the one Geoff and I did at Europython in 2005. It's longer though, a half day, and builds on all the experience we have had since, doing tutorials at XP2006 and agile2008 for example.

All in all, I hope we'll have some time and energy left to go to the other items in the programme. It looks like being a busy conference.

TDD performer artists announced

As I wrote in a previous post, I am organising a workshop at XP2009 called "Test Driven Development: Performing Art". I am very pleased to announce that I have four pairs of expert programmers willing to perform prepared Katas at it! You can read about it here. I am especially pleased that all the performers are experienced coders with previous involvement in coding dojos in places such as Stockholm, Linköping, London, São Paulo and Helsinki. I think we're going to have a great afternoon on 27th May.