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One of the great things about London is that sometimes good things from back home come over to visit, such as Lior. Last night was the third time that I’d seen this Sydney-based song writer and artist, and it was great to see that his popularity reaches across the globe (okay, well with many other Aussies who happen to be living across the other side of the world). The event was held at The Spitz, one of the smallest venues I’ve been to so far, but was a great atmosphere easily filled with 200-300 of his fans as well as new listeners of his amazing vocals and music.

He started with his two most popular songs, Autumn Flow and Daniel and interweaved a number of newer songs with a number of his very popular songs from his album. Lior enjoys interacting with the crowd, and last night was no exception with a number of close tales and jokes shared along the way. I think everyone was very impressed by his performance, all amazingly acoustic and stunned by the vocal range he achieves when he performs. He even tried to get the crowd involved with his Superficial song but I think failed to evaluate the (lack of) talent in the crowd - after all, we are there to listen to him. He finished the night off with his hauntingly stunning song, Grey Ocean and finished off with a Hebrew prayer.

TheKua.com Rating: 8 out of 10

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Despite a late start to the weekend, I still managed to arrive in Oporto at a decent enough time to bask in the warm sun. Admittedly it wasn’t as warm as I was expecting, with a weekend temperature of just below 20 degrees for most of the weekend, but at least there was no rain and quite a bit of sunshine.

Oporto is a Portuguese coastal town located north of the better known city of Lisbon. It is the home of Port wine, a sweeter variety of wine fortified with brandy and you can find a number of its makers on the southern bank of the river that splits Oporto. Portuguese wine is very good quality and I was lucky enough to catch them celebrating it on their river. Numerous stalls lined the banks of both sides of the river, giving samplings of red, white and rose wines as well crackers with sardines, bread and even chorizo at one of them. It only cost a single euro for a tasting glass and unlimited quantities of good quality wines.

The river is an essential part of Oporto life, with many of the buildings and streets towering around it. Numerous bridges separate the two banks giving easy access to most of the land, but the city centre and the two shores are easy enough to walk around if you are willing to tackle some hefty hills. There are plenty of churches around and it’s just amazing looking at the old buildings, some brightly coloured reds, whites and yellows as well as how a number of houses had been tiled on the outside, something you really don’t see on modern houses these days. Many of the houses hang Portuguese and even the odd Brazilian one showing how proud they are of their country.

Oporto has a good number of buses along the north bank of the river and there is even an old rickety tram to take you along the shore. There aren’t any ferry services across the river but you can take a river cruise for almost an hour at €10. I really liked the friendliness of the Portuguese people even though many did not speak English very well (or at all) but one thing that bugged me was the amount of smoking that went on, especially in restaurants and even in the middle of shopping centres as they walked around.

Fish plays a major part of the classic diet, and the Oporto speciality is a tripe dish that I did not give a go over real Portuguese BBQ chicken to which Nando’s does not quite match. Coffee is just as popular everywhere there, with the espresso apparently the standard one to have with one of the many Portuguese sweet breads or tarts.

Though a shorter visit than I expected, Oporto has much to offer and was a very enjoyable though exhausting weekend. More pictures can be seen here.

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This weekend I was going to be in Portugal but I missed my flight last night thanks to the not so Heathrow Express. What was supposed to be 15 minute journey ended up as just under an hour long one and meant I missed my check in by a few minutes. Thankfully I’ve been able to reschedule a flight for lunchtime today, but it does mean my weekend break is even shorter. Oh well, looks like it pays to leave buffering when you depend on three types of public transport to get to the airport.

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Oulu Finland is a very nice Finnish town, and the largest one in Northern Finland. It is closer to the Artic Circle than Helsinki, and at this time of year, has the Midnight Sun (effectively 24 hour sunlight). Admittedly it’s not extremely bright all day long, but it certainly never gets dark and the sunset lasts a very long time. The hotel has three layers of curtains so you can attempt to get some sleep.

Oulu has amazing bikeways that allow people to cycle or rollerblade any part of town. Our hotel for the conference was located by the river and main market square, a central hub of this city. Locals and tourists alike hang around the number of restaurants, pubs, stalls in this square soaking up the warm sunshine and the lively atmosphere. Amazingly the weather was stunning for all of the conference, and it only got mildly chilly at “night time” when a cool breeze was blowing.

The coast of Finland is also not too far away, and there is even a sand beach and beach resort at which you can kite-surf at. It’s certainly not a beach that has waves but the water was mild enough to take a bit of a swim in.

Finnish people are very friendly and helpful, even though some of them do not speak much English. Most of the ones I talked to spoke English very well. Long hair and beards are popular with men and the many heavy metal t-shirts worn by the youth really make you understand why Lordi represented Finland in this year’s Eurovision. At the conference we even had a unique opportunity to listen to, what I imagine as, the only shouting choir in the world. They actually make an amazing vocal group and their intensity is obvious from the vocals and the faces they make during their performance.

I had a fantastic time in Finland, both at the conference, and during what little free time I had to look around the city. The lush green fields and fresh country air also made quite the change from working in the middle of London. You can see more pictures from Oulu here.

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Final day. More highlights include:

• Entertaining keynote with Kent Beck talking about what is more Extreme than XP, and leading on to the discussion about the Responsible Developer. Like XP, his talk focused more on the developer role in an organisation but talked about what comes next.
• A fun two-part workshop with Rachel Davies and David Hussman talking about Agile Project Parameters where we brainstormed and dicussed the questions we might ask as an agile coach during a Project Chartering session.

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I’ve been having troubles posting things to my blog due to Internet access here, but this entry was written just after Sweden and England drew in the world cup (equivalent of midnight here in Finland), so here’s the recap of today’s goings on:

• Barry Boehm’s keynote – An interesting discussion in which he discussed different analysis models that could still be used in agile, considering risk management and balancing agility and discipline. He talked about the scaling of agile to scrum of scrums and research indicating where agile is most applicable.
• Panel of Notable Agile Leaders including (Angela Martin, Rachel Davies, Jutta Eckstein, David Hussman, Emmanuel Gaillot, Mary Poppendieck and Michael Feathers) holding a fantastic discussion on Politics and Religion in Agile Development. A lot of the advice they gave and their own ‘war stories’ struck a chord with me so much in my experiences and different projects I’ve worked on. It was great for them to all be so honest and give their opinions. Kudos to Angela for being an excellent moderator for the session!
• Value Stream Mapping – An excellent exercise with Mary Poppendieck, involving identifying waste in an entire value chain (i.e. when a customer requests a features and they are using it), and more interestingly the strategies or areas of focus for particular project examples.
• Coder’s Dojo – Coming half way through this session, I still had lots of fun with this hands of workshop presented by Christophe Thibaut and Emmanuel Gaillot. We did a bit of dynamic language group pairing adhering to a small set of well defined rules that I found fascinating from many different perspectives, most especially the social one.
• Final keynote by Jack Jarvik discussing methods he applied in the early 1990s that appear aligned or similar to many of the XP/Scrum practices.

What can I say, but what another fantastic day?

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I’m keeping this brief since I don’t have time to write more and want to keep a track of significant things came up today.

• Pekka Himanen presented the keynote, The Hacker Ethic discussing environmental issues and attitudes that make up, not what I interpret as just a hacker, but someone who is passionate about their work and the things that can help sustain or maintain their energy levels. Things like building up a sense of community and trust certainly help.
• I was a little disappointed with Agile Development with Domain Specific Languages, in that it was fairly tool centric – with MS DSL tools for Visual Studio and Metacase. We had some post discussion had about whether or not a meta model was actually needed for a domain specific language (i.e. do you need to validate the language the user is using, or just trust that they are doing the right thing).
• Open space sessions – I think trialled for the first time in the European series of XP conferences, were extremely popular with well over fifteen dynamic sessions planned. I actually just got back from attending one scheduled for 10pm back in the hotel, throwing about DSLs vs FIT and which one was better.
• My presentation on building Agile GUIs went quite well – got some great feedback and helped some other developers writing client side applications to validate or assert the things they were doing.

I got some great feedback in that, yes, the acceptance tests I used as an example could be written in a script-friendly manner (with a few new tools such as JUseCase and Exactor), but there was nothing that would stop me from refactoring to FIT or any of these other frameworks. The focus of my presentation was not focused on how you write acceptance tests (since people like FIT have already addressed this), but rather how you go about building up the different components, and Acceptance Tests spawning additional unit and unit integration tests to get the Acceptance Test passing. It looks completely different from any normal Swing code you would ever see tutorials for.

• Great meeting with lots of people in the industry and lots of people you have read, but were great meeting. The workshop with Mary and Tom Poppendieck on the weekend was great, but now I’ve also met heaps of other interesting people such as Charlie Poole, JB Rainsberger, Mike Hill, Mike Feathers, Erik Lundh, David Hussman, and Jutta Eckstein just to name a few.
• The final keynote of the day was interesting about how, five or six years down the track, how successful has the agile movement been and where do we go from here. It was presented by Sean Hanly, who works for the main sponsor of this year’s conference and I think he put it together fairly well. Paraphrasing him, how do we keep the heart and principles behind agile as it continues to be used and ‘abused’ so that it doesn’t end up on the same process graveyard many other processes have been.

Whoops, I said I’d keep it short, but oh well…

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This will be a short one - I’m in my hotel at Oulu, Finland after a huge journey - thanks to Finnair for being late in leaving Heathrow an hour late and though I managed to catch my connecting flight from Helsinki to Oulu, my luggage didn’t quite make it with me. Hope it comes soon! On towards checking out the city and the conference.

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