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I just got back from watching Pete Murray perhaps at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Out of the number of venues I have been to in London so far, this is one of my most favourite since it is relatively intimate and close to where I live. Pete Murray’s concert was announced a while back and sold out quite quickly. He soon announced another one, to which I fortunately got tickets to go and see.

I remember when Ben invited me to see Pete Murray at The Rev, a much smaller and even more intimate venue in Brisbane. I was impressed with his tunes back then, and it was just before he got really big. The next time I saw him play was two months later where he played for a massive crowd at Splendour in the Grass after which his then album, Feeler, rocketed through the charts.

His latest album, See the Sun, has seen the same success as his previous, and as of this writing, currently one of the top ten albums in Australian charts. This album is filled with the same husky vocals and acoustic guitar sounds as his previous album but the tunes and lyrics tend to take a more summery and brighter feel.

Tonight’s concert was a good mix of good and old, starting with a classic and finishing with a classic all backed by another awesome band, The Stonemason’s. The venue was completely packed out with a good mix of English, Canadian and other antipodean people all taken by the set lasting for almost an hour and a half. Pete himself seems fairly timid, unlike your typically flamboyant rock star, but he still manages to play a mean song.

Definitely one of the best gigs I’ve been to this year!

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Being on new projects brings lots of new opportunities for learning, especially when dealing with lots of new people. I consider myself one of the more experienced agilists on our current project and I realise that the way I am used to working on projects will be fundamentally different from one that hasn’t had my experience. I like things to be fast, dynamic, self-empowered and interesting but this isn’t always the case for everyone.

As I further refine my skills as an agile coach I like to approach projects with an observe-advise-implement mantra all based on developing trust and getting the most effective results for the project, team and business. It’s all a very tricky balance to maintain as often these goals are not aligned with each other.

One of the benefits of being fresh on a project is that you can bring a different perspective and suggest improvements to parts that others may have already developed a thick skin towards. One of the things that, as a new person, have to change is the way in which you worked on previous projects.

I heavily disagree with evangelists that need to apply the same practices on their current project simply because it worked on their previous project. As a change agent to a project, you want to avoid changing things simply because it’s not the way that you’re used to working. Applying the same practices from previous projects may never work because you are dealing with different people with different skills and strengths.

A better approach is to highlight any weaknesses or inefficiencies you might see incrementally and suggest alternative practices that might work better since there might be a plethora of them to choose from. You want to get as much of the team involved as possible with making a decision since people resent having change forcibly thrust upon them.

As a process coach, you need to respect that everyone has different abilities to cope with change and like with most good things, introduce them incrementally.

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Located in one of the corners of the Spitafields Markets is a small innocuous café serving up southern-style American foods. A flame grilling BBQ stands tall as you walk into the dining area, a small gathering of rickety tables surrounded by older, yet remarkably comfortable chairs all covered by a patio, in an endeavour to recreate what you might imagine a restaurant in the ‘Deep South’ might seem like. Each table contains all you might need to eat your food with various hot sauces, napkins, plastic cutlery and little packets of Heinz Tomato Ketchup.

We arrived at lunch time and the fire was only just starting to get cracking. Though we weren’t expecting a real American, we were eventually greeted by what seemed like a straight-to-the-point Londoner whose looks alone said the, ‘wadda ya want ta orda?’

Prices at this café are not cheap, my Beef Brisket sandwich costing £7.20 and the pork rib platter costing even more. Strangely enough you have to pay as soon as you order and you don’t need to ever worrying about paying service since that’s also included in your total.

After shortly paying, our waitress delivered our meal on small paper and plastic plates, still keeping in touch with the ‘theme’ but hardly looking like the good money we had just handed over. My sandwich was literally just that – a load of beef brisket crammed into the middle of a bread roll. I found the beef brisket tender but definitely could have done with some additional BBQ sauce to give it more flavour. I think the platters seem like a more balanced option, served with several types of salads, but apparently all of them not particularly special.

The pork rib (note that there was only one big one) was also tender but unfortunately lacked the smokiness you might expect from a proper flame BBQ and dry without any additional BBQ sauce.

I’ve read that the steaks are the best things to eat here, and regrettably I didn’t try it since they were rather dear as well. Unfortunately I can’t really recommend this place to anyone and I won’t be returning to anytime soon.

Details: Arkansas Cafe
Found On: 107b Commercial Street, Old Spitafields Market, Liverpool St
Highlights: Good variety of American beer
Improvements: Tender but flavourless meats that are overpriced for what you get. A wider variety of offerings and improved service would be welcomed by patrons.
The Kua Rating: 5 out of 10

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It still seems that no matter how mainstream particular technologies get, many developers do not clearly understand how those technologies should be applied. One developer I’ve worked with in the past before always stated that they wrote ‘JUnits’, which is admittedly, better than people not writing tests, but they still didn’t make it clear what sort of testing they were doing. I’ve also seen this same mistake applied in a build for a suite of tests marked as ‘FIT’ (a different framework for testing).

The thing that bothers me about statements like this is that JUnit and FIT libraries are a means to an end. JUnit is great because it is so mainstream and simple that people can quickly understand how it works. Stating that someone is about to write a JUnit is like saying to me that they are about to go and write java (well duh!).

One of the most useful things I find on a project is building up a common understanding of the groups of tests. I have my own starting point, and adapt labels depending on how strongly people feel about their own understanding levels. I like to begin with at least three levels of tests including:

1. Unit tests
2. Unit integration tests
3. Acceptance tests

The first level of tests are sometimes better referred to as class level tests, and are intended for testing code at their most granular level (such as a method, etc). They should be able to run without any external dependencies.

Unit integration tests – something that I may refer to as functional tests should be applied when classes have a higher level of interaction – sometimes with each other, or more importantly something that will slow down the tests suite – such as a file system, a networked system or a DB (yes, even an in memory DB). These tests typically are IO bound, and may even require external configuration or setup before execution.

Acceptance tests are intended to test the configuration and the ‘wiring’ up of your application. Tests will be the longest running part of your suite since they are testing parts of the code over and over again through various paths, but these ones validate that the application is meeting the business value that drives it. These tests should simulate real life scenarios and interactions, but a failure in this suite should typically have a matching failure in the unit test build.

The choice of technology should always be secondary to the effort of communicating your intent, and should be reflected by the words that you choose. Saying what sort of test you writing is always much better than how it is going to be done.

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The last week has seen London in a great bout of weather with bright blue skies and warm temperatures (today a scorching 31 degrees!). People are out in the park (or watching the world cup in some pub) and it’s a great time to be in London. Yesterday afternoon we went up to Primrose Hill for a picnic, an awesome place for watching the sun set at 9pm overlooking the rest of London. Spectacular!

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And that’s not just some long-haired hippie’s opinion. Wednesday night we had a mini-geek night at work and we got onto the topic of whether or not (code) magic was good or bad. It was a great conversation and because Ade doesn’t have a blog (when are you going to get one?), I thought I’d write about it.

I struggled at first to work out what we meant by ‘magic’ and we somehow concluded at some point, for it to be ‘the unknown’. For instance, when you plug stuff into the Rails framework, there’s some sort of ‘magic’ going on to hook it all up. The focus of the discussion was really about whether or not we thought magic was good or not.

To actually substitute our other meaning, ‘the unknown’ for magic makes the question a very strange one – ‘Is the unknown good or bad?’

My attempt at answering this question was that the concept of magic is not good or bad, but whether or not the attempt at magic is good or bad. In general, I personally like magic because it makes my life easier. I shouldn’t have to understand how the compiler, for instance, turns code I write into bytecode every time I want to do something. I like the fact that it just works and that’s how it is. The abstraction or illusion holds true every time I run it and I can depend on it to work day in and out.

I consider magic good if it doesn’t require you to understand it. Bad magic on the other hand is bad because it forces you to work out how it works, and that need, let alone the experience, is generally traumatising. It’s like a magician’s illusion failing us because you have to go behind the scenes to understand all the little tricks that made it work. What can make it worse is if it is difficult to investigate how it works such as the source code not being available, or horrible code that’s hard to read, or an abstraction that just doesn’t work.

All of this is circumstantial and really depends on how well the magic was built. If the magic works all the time (and generally that’s because the abstraction is sound) and it does all the things that you need, then I think it’s a good thing.

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For my latest long haul flight back home, I’d bought a couple of second hand books to keep me entertained for the flight. Of the two, the most appropriate one for my trip back to Australia was Bill Bryson’s Down Under. Anyone who has read any of his books will agree with me that Bryson has a talent for producing entertaining writings about the most insignificant event, making almost every part of his books enjoyable reading materials.

In this particular book, Bryson manages to travel to all parts of Australia including the more commercial capitals and, more interestingly, a number of the smaller towns that either made it into the news for some particular event, or played a significant part of Australia’s history. The amount of travelling he achieves in Australia is impressive and undoubtedly exceeds far more than many Australians have, or will ever do. It certainly exceeds the amount of travelling I’ve done within Australia.

Bryson writes about local customs, Australia’s history and quirks that may appear strange to outsiders (and with some being truly quirky). Some of them you can interpret as being slightly biased by his own roots, but for the most part are both accurate and succinct. I found this book engaging and almost too easy to devour in one sitting and I think it is a great read for anyone visiting Australia. Be wary though as Bryson has a tendency to exaggerate, so make sure you take what he writes with a grain of salt. It’s not like every day, all around Australia people are dying from red-back spider bites or crocodile and shark attacks. I am certain that any Australian will be able to relate to certain parts of the book and will hopefully find it as entertaining as I did.

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With boxes and boxes of donuts…

They’re opening a new store in Milton Keynes and they were at the train station giving out boxes of them. What a way to start a Monday!

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