Author Archives: John
A weekend in Brussels: The Free Open Source Developers’ European Meeting
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 … Continue reading
Decentralized Social Platforms
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 … Continue reading
Day 2 in the Big Brother House (or at SPA 2010): 4-hours of hands-on Scala
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 … Continue reading
Monday afternoon at SPA 2010: Patterns in build and deployment followed by a BoF
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 … Continue reading
Next up at SPA 2010: A talk by a real architect
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 … Continue reading
Improving Software Development Across Government 2-Day Conference
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. … Continue reading
First workshop at BCS SPA 2010: REST
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 … Continue reading
