Last weekend saw two days of open sourcery at Europe’s premier open source conference. FOSDEM is for developers by developers. There are around 40 tracks, lightning talks, hack rooms and most of the major open source projects have stands, demos and of course swag. Best of all, it’s free! Yes that’s right, a major conference held … Continued
A response to Richard’s post: One thing I still haven’t “got” is how the distributed model of buddycloud, diaspora, etc, actually works, i.e. what is the user experience like. I suspect that’s also the challenge they face, getting the public to understand, if they are to be successful. Do you “get it” yet? If so, … Continued
A while ago I was pretty convinced Scala would be the next Java. I’m now less sure and it’s mainly down to (a) skills – there’s a lot of Java about; and (b) [and very much related to (a)] there are too many languages around today for any one to gain critical mass, particularly with … Continued
This was a pretty rambling session lead by Julian Simpson. His site contains lots of build and deployment related patterns and best practice. Unfortunately I didn’t find this session helpful but picked up the following: Make deployment an atomic operation – makes sense, I’m thinking tricky with Alfresco but doable. Pull upgrades, don’t push them … Continued
Morris Mitchell is a renowned architect. He talked about patterns a fair bit. Interesting but probably the least relevant talk unfortunately, as I had high hopes given the Christopher Alexander reference early in the talk. A couple of interesting parallels with our world but nothing new. One statement he did make that resonated with me … Continued
On Thursday 29th April 2010, I attended the above. As well as a number of government speakers, Ivar Jacobson and Scott Ambler gave keynotes on practices and agile at scale respectively. Software Engineering Practices I’ve heard this talk many times. The bottom-line is that Ivar believes processes such as RUP, SCRUM and XP should be, … Continued
The first workshop I attended covered REST (Respresentational State Transfer) or, and these are my words, using the relatively simple vocabulary of verbs provided by HTTP, e.g. POST and GET, to provide a simple protocol to make requests and return responses (data and links to actions, i.e. workflow) using URIs. REST got a pretty negative … Continued