Last night I heard Mike Cohn speak about Agile Planning and Estimation. Mike’s a great speaker who I highly recommend to you seeing, but you may know him from his company, Mountain Goat software, or his book, User Stories Applied.
Though I’m lucky enough to practice many of the items he spoke about, my most favourite emphasised points of the night included:
One of the books that has been on my list for a while is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. This short book written by Malcolm Gladwell helps you think about the way that you think and the role that your subconscious thoughts play. The book describes many scenarios in which over-thinking problems leads to problematic solutions and other examples demonstrating that only a short amount of information is enough to make the best decisions.
I like the way the author gave many examples but I found I came away without a clear message about when you should follow your “instincts” or when searching for additional information can help. The book left me with an impression that when you are an expert in sometime, there are subtle nuances that allow you to make quick choices about them, and trying to reproduce them by artificial means (such as a process or a program) is near impossible.
It’s a great book and admittedly easy to read. I feel I need to read it again to get a better insight into how I can apply this in every day life but I feel I can still recommend it.
TheKua.com Rating: 7 out of 10
The last time I had completed any of the “He Who Knows Challenge” was a very long time ago, so I thought it was time to pick one more off the list. This time around I thought it might be good to carry it out with the one other person who is also supposed to complete this challenge, so Ben, Michelle, my sister and I went out for lunch on Saturday to complete this next challenge.
Deciding on which Conran restaurant was the difficult part, with so many in London to choose from, and each offering different types of cuisines and experiences. In the end we picked Butler’s Wharf Chop House and though I wouldn’t necessarily say this restaurant is based on any of most extravagant of Conran’s designs, its decor complements the contemporary English dishes on offer. The booking process was extremely efficient, one morning I submitted a booking form online at about 7am, and at about 9:30am, someone called from the restaurant confirming the reservation.
The pictures on their site do little justice for the restaurant, with one of the highlights really being the wharf-front views, giving terrace diners unobstructed views of Tower Bridge itself. We were fortunate that London gave out what is probably the last summery days we’ll see, really lighting up Tower Bridge and giving us a splendid backdrop for a lazy Saturday lunch.
The menu is straightforward with set prices for both a two or three course meal and a reasonable variety of dishes to choose from in all courses (in addition to the daily specials). Certain dishes have supplementary fees and you can order side dishes at an additional price if you like. We all ordered different things so it was great we could compare and contrast the different dishes. We started the lunch by ordering two courses, leaving ourselves to see how rich or substantial each dish might be before placing the dessert order. Even though each dish was reasonably sized, we all decided at the end of the main course to order dessert and I think we were all pleased we did.
Here’s a list of the things that I ordered (and apologise that I didn’t take a picture of the entire menu so the detail is not as accurate as it could have been):
I really enjoyed the afternoon spent with everyone, and the great weather really set a wonderful backdrop for the great conversation despite all the tourists walking by. I certainly couldn’t afford to do this every week but it is definitely a great place to indulge for a special occasion.
Details: Butler’s Wharf Chop House
Found On: Butlers Wharf Building, 36e Shad Thames, London SE1 2YE
Contactable On: 020 7403 3403 or via their website
Highlights: Contemporary and extremely high quality English cuisine served in affable surroundings looking out at Tower Bridge and the Thames. The food was delicious and extremely well prepared boosted by an extensive wine list and the experience from reservation to finishing up was excellent.
Improvements: It would be nice to have the current menu on offer up to date on their website.
The Kua Rating: 9 out of 10
Anyone who has owned a blog using some standard blogging software will have dealt with horrible spam at sometime. It’s a frustrating and time consuming annoyance, and many people give up to the torrents of spammed comments or trackbacks. Obviously there must be some economic reason for spammers to continue, but I do (and I’m sure that you too) hope they pay dearly for it in karmic retribution later in their life.
I’ve tried several attempts to stop spammers, but most techniques require additional work. I considered the Captcha plugin, that is a popular tool many people adopt, but forces real commenters to work more (by typically reading an image and inputting some numbers or characters) and reduces the accessibility of your website.
My most recent attempt which seems to be working (so far) is the Akismet plugin for WordPress. For other wordpress users out there, I suggest giving it a go.
When passing through some of the London Underground stations, it is all too easy to think that they are extremely unkempt places (which is true for the most part). A rare handful of stations participate in a program encouraging ‘Platform Art’ aiming to make public transport that much more enjoyable.
The Gloucester Road station is currently exhibiting work painted by Chiho Aoshima, with the entire piece titled ‘City Glow – Mountain Whisper’. Its bright pictures are painted in what looks like classic Japanese Otaku style, and its apt theme of a cityscape transformed into human-like characters really lightens up the entire station.
You can read more about the exhibition on the Transport for London website here.
This week I was fortunate enough to present at Javazone, the biggest conference in Norway, and as one local told me, apparently the second biggest java conference in all of Europe. The conference sold out to its maximum capacity of 1400 Norwegians one month before it even started, certainly demonstrating Java’s popularity and the talent pool this country has to offer. The IT industry in Norway appears exceptionally healthy with all of the stands aggressively recruiting people. Local Norwegians confirmed the current state constantly describing the wealth of opportunities available to them.
A lot of the developers I spoke to use the basic toolkit of Hibernate and Spring for most of their projects, and I found it a good sign most of them do automated testing of some form and some level of continuous integration. Many of them have adopted more specifically XP practices, but adoption of the agile values still seem to be missing. A Norwegian TW alumnus I spoke to confirmed this observation and is something he is struggling with in his current role.
I was surprised not to see many more sessions focused on Web 2.0 (as if there’s even a thing!) technologies, with only one session demonstrating the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Overall it was a well balanced conference with a number of sessions covering topics in core java (Swing, Java5, advanced memory tricks and tuning), enterprise java (EJB3, SOA, Webservices), web (JSF, GWT), testing (Watir, Selenium), methodology (Scrum, lean) and some fun stuff including mobile and embedded java.
Quite a number of notable java people came and spoke including the likes of Bruce Tate, James Strachan, Joshua Bloch, Rod Johnson, Gavin King, Floyd Marinescu and even a small handful of the agile community including Ken Schwaber, Mary and Tom Poppendieck and Johannes Brodwall.
If I got anything out of it personally, I now know that:
I felt my presentation went successfully (on Test Driving Swing Applications) with an attendance of somewhere around 120 people. I had a great time talking and meeting people as well as sharing my experiences at such a large conference and would highly recommend anyone to present or even just there (thought it helps if you can speak Norwegian).
Since the start of last weekend, I have been lucky to see probably the best weather that Oslo offers for sometime with bright blue skies and not especially cold days. Some of the great things that you have to do if you ever visit Oslo (at least in the summer time) is:
I think that most people have a very good lifestyle and though things appear costly, the standards of living appear much higher. For example, for the same amount of rent you might pay in London, you may still get something smallish in the centre of Oslo, but it will at least be modern, well designed and, at the very minimum, very well built. Oslo still has its fair share of problems, with many homeless people and less welcoming people surrounding the area just near the central station.
Central Oslo is not very big, most things are well within walking distance, and trams, buses and ferries make getting around to other areas further out extremely easy.
I was fortunate enough to know a few locals from my time at University, and thanks to Kurt, I even was able to attend an extremely rare and popular afternoon tea event with Steven Twining (the tenth generation of the Twining family). Though I think of tea as very English, I was surprised to find out Norwegians are large tea drinkers (after coffee) and were the reason that Twinings created the less malodorous Lady Grey tea. I caught up with a bunch of other people from University, dining at some wonderful restaurants including Plah for dinner followed by Pascal for desserts. They gave me the inside to some great places to hang out but because of the fantastic weather I spent most of my time basking in the sun by the harbour down at Akry Bryges, or on the other side of Akershus Castle looking over the spectacular harbour front.
You can check out more photos from my time in Oslo here.
I’m writing (or at least trying) to write this entry from an Internet cafe in central Oslo. It’s been a beautiful weekend filled to the brim with lots of sight seeing and pictures will be following in a while. It may take some time though since I am presenting at the Javazone conference in a couple of days. You can find the rest of my conference material here, and I will be post an update as I go.
I’ve just been having a lot of “fun” trying to find all the normal keys between all the unique ones that you find on a Norweigian keyboard (particularly with all the symbols). Some of them are off by one, but others have forced me to use the “Alt Gr” key for the first time. Expect some updates within the week.
