The intersection of technology and leadership

Category: .Net (Page 1 of 2)

Thoughts from Øredev 2011

Keynote 1: Alexis Ohanian

The first keynote titled, “Only your mom wants to use your website” came from Alexis Ohanian, a geek who helped create Reddit, Hipmunk and a few other sites. He’s passionate about users and you can really see how that manifests itself and very appropriate for a conference with a theme of Userverse. He told the audience, “As geeks, we’re at an advantage. There are so many bad websites out there so if you focus on creating an awesome experience, it’s very easy to compete.” It just came back to treating your customers and really delighting your customers.

He uses some really great examples about how he engaged users with a couple of his websites. For example, with Reddit, there’s the mascot in the top hand corner of the page and talks about doing a 30-day animation series that really connected with dedicated reddit users who were so concerned when, during one the days, the mascot went missing and they emailed in constantly to find out where he went.

With hipmunk, he recounts the story of personally stuffing envelopes with handmand hipmunk travel stuff to send off to some of his users. For no good reason other than to surprise them. In return, people sent photos of the hipmunk in all sorts of places and travelling around. It’s the little things that really delight.

Keynote 2: Neal Ford

Neal’s a really awesome speaker and would highly recommend any technical person to watch his very strong presentations. Fortunately it looks like JFokus just published the same speech Neal gave at Øredev so you can see. The focus of his topic was really about Abstraction Distractions and is a really important key message for us technical folks. It also really relates well to this XKCD comic.

The whole premise about his talk is that users don’t really want to hear the techncial reasons why something does or doesn’t work. You have to make them undersatnd the impact of what it has. He seeds the presentations with lots of pro-tips including things like, “Don’t confuse the abstraction with the real thing” giving the example of wanting to store a recipe and concerned about how to store a recipe that will last many technologies, that even its representation isn’t quite the same thing as the recipe itself.

The ImageThink graphic facilitators had trouble keeping up with the pace that Neal speaks at. He’s definitely the sort of high energy, many idea kind of guys.

Keynote 3: Dan North

Dan is a great an entertaining speaker than everyone really enjoys. He spoke on “Embracing Uncertainty – the Hardest Pattern of All.” I guess a lot of his entertaining anecdotes and stories were really focused around our human bias for closure.

Keynote 4: Jeff Atwood

I’m glad to hear Jeff present this keynote, “Social Software for the Anti-Social Part II: Electric Boogaloo” as he handed over one of his speaking slots to an employee of his in a talk on a previous day that turned out to be a bit of a disappointment for many people. His keynote carried on from a previous talk, carrying on with lots of lessons learned, particularly about how they built Stackoverflow with game mechanics in mind.

It’ll probably be online soon, but it’s one definitely worth watching as it’s an interesting balance between democracy, openness yet some directing behaviour thrown in.

About the conference

I’m constantly impressed by the organisation and the the quality of the conference. I’m really surprised it doesn’t attract more people from Europe and what I call, a little bit of a hidden gem. It has some really wonderful speakers, great topics and the venue itself is pretty good (although there’s poor noise isolation between the different rooms). There’s plenty of interesting events in the evenings and a great place to chat to people both during and after the conference, although I think the “unofficial” Øredev pub needs to grow a bit to accomodate so many geeks.

Other talks of significance

I went to quite a number of talks but will write up some of the more interesting ones (for me).

  • Copenhagen Suborbitals – This was a bit of a surprise talk. It was very late in the day, ending almost at about 9pm or 10pm and was a guy based in Copenhagen who’s attempting to build his own spaceship to launch him into suborbital. It’s a really amazing tale and one I can appreciate for a guy who’s serious about following his passion. The talk started off quite entertainingly about how building a spaceship was a bit ambitious, so he started off by building a submarine! He’s a really engaging speaker and I don’t want to ruin too many of his good stories. I suggest going over to his blog (he’s still building his spaceship) and seeing where he is. He relies on donations to keep this project running and I love the fact it’s such an open-source project as well with people offering their advice and expertise in many different areas. He’s got lots of great lessons to share that are completely relevant to everyone.
  • Aaron Parecki on his startup story for Geoloqi – I listened to this guy talk about his startup, and similarly along the same lines at the Orbitals, he told the tale of what started off as a hobby eventually turned into a real startup opportunity and shared a lot of his lessons along the way. It’s an interesting start up that you can read more about on gizmodo here
  • Jeff Patton – Jeff had a great session introducing people to the UX stage and trying to set the stage for lots of the other speakers. Jeff has a wealth of wisdom and experience to share and what was really powerful was him sharing images and stories about the different roles and techniques people use to build useful software and integrating it into agile processes. Really powerful stuff that I think every developer should really go through.

Reflections on my talk
Titled, “Collaboration by better understanding yourself”, I presented on the idea that we have lots of in built reactions as developers that really hold us back from collaborating more effectively. My goal was for people to go away, thinking more about the things that effect them and why they don’t collaborate as much as they should. I got some great feedback and was particularly nervous because not only did I have a good number of people but I had many other presenters I really respected in attendance including Portia Tung, Doc List, Johanna Rothman, Jean Tabaka, Jim Benson and more.

Although I’d practiced, there’s a few more tweaks I would make to this, but was very happy with some of the people who came up to me throughout the conference who felt that they really connected to the topic and felt really enthused to do something about it. Exactly what I wanted. 🙂

Disabling Flip Screen

When using R#, or IntelliJ, the keyboard shortcuts often involving hitting some combination of CTRL, ALT, SHIFT. Unfortunately my laptop (using an Intel graphics card) for Windows 7 has CTRL+ALT+UP and CTRL+ALT+DOWN bound to flipping the screen.

Really surprising the first time and grew troublesome when I wanted to rearrange the order of some methods.

Disable this keyboard short cut on the dialog as shown above. This was accessed via the Control Panel – Intel (R) GMA Driver for Mobile.

Thoughts On Øredev

Last week Sweden’s Malmö hosted Øredev for the sixth time. I believe it attracted more than 1400 people, all with varying backgrounds and interests. Unsurprisingly, the majority of attendees turned out to be Swedish and Danish people (with Malmö very well connected to Denmark via their famous Baltic Ocean crossing train).

The Cultural Experiences
Being held in Sweden, the organising committee did well to treat us to some cultural delights including the Swedish sauna-Baltic Ocean run followed up by a delicious traditional fish meal). One of the organising members even welcomed us into their home for drinks before the speakers’ dinner where Glögg continued to keep the cold at bay. The difference of soaking raisins and almonds really surprised me. Malmö’s deputy mayor then welcomed us at their majestic townhall where all the speakers unanimously marvelled at the decadent surroundings. The meal stayed true to the region with first, a regional speciality, black soup (and yes, like black pudding, it has a very special ingredient) before following that up with a hearty roast goose meal and a spiced apple pudding for dessert.

Logistics and Organisation
The organisers impressed me with how smoothly the entire conference ran. Malmö’s Slagthuset (slaughterhouse) hosted the conference for the first time and although not all the spaces turned out ideal (with small walkways between some major rooms), I think it contributed to the friendliness and openness I discovered.

The organisers also did a fabulous job responding to attendee’s needs. For example, on Monday they moved a number of tutorials to warmer rooms after realising the strong draughts let in by workmen who still needed to complete their work. Another example is when they quickly disabled the authentication on the wi-fi when it proved to be another barrier to being connected. Unfortunately the wi-fi turned out to be a little bit flakier throughout the conference.

I also really enjoyed the evening entertainment that flowed into the venue rather than the “move to another location and lose people” approach several other conferences do. This helped to keep the conversation flowing (and we all love our flow!).

Topics
Øredev offered a huge variety of interesting topics with tracks covering mainstream languages such as Java/.Net, NoSQL, Agile & Lean, Collaboration, Patterns, Smart Phones and Architecture with lots of really interesting topics. I’d keep an eye out for their website and trawl the twitterverse (#oredev) for the interesting discussions.

The keynote presenters also turned out really well.

Dr Jeffrey Norris presented what he thought as agile values leading to mission critical success at NASA (Vision, Risk and Commitment) demonstrating through a “wow” 3D demonstration using the ARToolKit. He used the stories of famous inventors, particularly the rise of Graham Alexander Bell to emphasis these elements very effectively.

I saw John Seddon a few months ago and although I’d heard him present pretty much the same talk, appreciated his message was an important one that more people really needed to hear. I think there is great value in spreading his emphasis on holistic system thinking even further in the work that we do. Entertaining and very British, Seddon completed his keynote without leaning on any slides and to a very positive reaction from the audience.

I missed Henrik Kniberg‘s keynote so can’t really comment.

The final keynote came from Atari Corporation geek legend Nolan Bushnell envisaging what the next key software projects would be in the future. I think everyone enjoyed the talk simply because it was Nolan though I think wasn’t as executed as professionally as it could have been.

People to meet
One of the really great parts of Øredev was all the people around you. As one person put it, you could be talking to a person and then suddenly realise that they created X (where X = language, framework, tool, etc) or someone who wrote a lot of the blog entries that you’ve been reading. I think that the conference does a wonderful job of creating a really relaxed atmosphere for people to converse and the speakers are all really approachable and involved in all of the sessions as well.

I have to admit I also really appreciated the opportunities to connect to a number of fellow ThoughtWorks colleagues (both past and present) who I’d either not got a chance to meet, or hadn’t seen for a very long time. This is one of the consequences of working for a global consultancy – you get to communicate and build relationships for a distance yet rarely get to meet people face to face.

iPad observations
One huge point worth noting was the large role that the iPad played during this developer conference. Obviously, being fairly geeky I hadn’t expected so many of them yet it proved to be one of the best devices for capturing notes & particularly useful for reading and contributing tweets. Laptops lose out on both portability and, on average, a very so-so battery life.

Reading tweets to view session using the native iPad twitter client also worked really well without having to use the keyboard or mouse – this is where gestures and multi touch really shined.

My session
Chris Hedgate, organiser for the track on collaboration invited me to speak. Titled, “Tightening the Feedback Loop“, I spoke about how to give and receive more effective interpersonal feedback. I had some great tweets in response and some great feedback on the presentation (meta!) I’m encouraged that more people will be better equipped in their professional and personal life after attending.

Conclusion
I highly recommend presenting and/or attending Oredev. You’ll meet a whole heap of really interesting people and, no doubt, come away with at least an idea or two.

Nant working directory

Splitting out your build file into smaller manageable chunks is a good practice to keeping them maintainable. Incorporating existing build files into your main one can sometimes be tricky, particularly when dealing with targets that depend on paths. Where you assumed you were executing one build file in a certain directory, suddenly you need to be able to run it from the root directory as well.

To maintain backwards compatibility (able to run it from the existing directory and a higher, root directory), I make use of nant’s ability to override property values (not supported by ant). Here’s the snippet of code I used:

<include buildfile="differentDirectory\deepdown\nested.build"/>
<property name="nested.build.root" value="differentDirectory\deepdown"/>
<if test="${file::exists('nested.build')}">
  <property name="nested.build.root" value="."/>
</if>
<echo message="Running nested build from ${nested.build.root}"/>

Visual Studio 2008 – The Anti Region Shortcut

If you happen to be unfortunate enough to stumble across “region”-ised C# code, use the following short cut keys to expand all in a file:

CTRL-M + CTRL-L

Give it a go! Or better yet, disable all code folding by default:

Text Editor -> C# -> Advanced. Uncheck “Enter outlining mode when files

Go to Text Editor->C#->Advanced. Under the “Outlining” section, uncheck the option labelled “Enter outlining mode when files open”.

Coding styles leads to (or prevents) certain classes of bugs

I fixed a bug yesterday caused by a loop that terminated too early. It took me a while to understand the fact that it was terminating too early, and I realised that I’ve never written this type of bug because of the way that I tend to write code. Basically, the method looked like this:

public void someMethod() {
   for ( String key : keys ) {
       if (someCondition()) {
         return;
       }
       doSomeProcessingForThe(key);
   }
}

As you can see, the innocent looking return statement breaks out of the entire method, and what they really wanted was a continue statement instead. Note that TDD had been applied to this codebase, and it’s just another reminder that driving your code with tests isn’t enough (you also want to think of ensuring you write more comprehensive tests, particularly for loops).

I’m writing this post because I though it’s interesting that I realised a certain coding style removes (and possibly adds) a whole class of bugs. Had I been writing the code to start with, I probably would have avoided the use of the return (and/or continue) statement resulting in the following code:

public void someMethod() {
   for ( String key : keys ) {
       if (!someCondition()) {
         doSomeProcessingForThe(key);
       }       
   }
}

Prevention is easy with tools like checkstyle, PMD or findbugs (and maybe some of them already check for this). If not, I think it’d be easy to add.

Treat your App.config like a global variable

I remember looking at a few codebases in C# and it surprised me how many people encapsulate some of their system well, yet treat their application configuration as a different thing. Many times I’ve seen code that looks like: ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["DatabaseConnectionString"]; alongside the thing that is using it. In fact, I often see this code repeated in various parts of the system wherever anyone needs to draw on application configuration.

Global variables are bad
Most good programmers seem to realise that most global variables are bad, yet this is exactly what I think accessing the application configuration is like. If you want to change the way your configuration is loaded (i.e. programmatically or from a database) think of how many places you now need to change it, let alone how it effects the order in which you instantiate objects.

My advice: Separate the use of configuration from where it declared
I try to follow the pattern isolating the configuration into a single class depending on the access method, such as:

  • DatabaseBackedConfiguration
  • FileBackedConfiguration
  • DefaultInMemoryBackedConfiguration

Each of these classes them implement several roles depending on what configuration they might provide such as:

  • HibernateConfiguration
  • ApplicationConfiguration
  • ArchivingConfiguration

Having smaller roles makes it clearer what sort of configuration is really needed for a particular consumer, and it allows me to change the decision about how that configuration is now provided to it. It enables me to do things like specify different environment configurations and do so in the method that I prefer.

Losing my London .Net Users Group virginity

About 60 people (only of which three or four were female) crammed into a tiny room near Red Lion Square last night for the London DotNet Users Group meeting. I have no idea what the normal turnout rate is, though I guess the topic (TDD) probably drew quite a lot of people. Three people presented and the meeting ran for a total of three hours until 9:30pm at which point, we left for the pub and stayed until closing.

The three presenters for the evening and the topics included:

  • Zi Makki: TDD and the Data Access Layer
  • Sebastien Lambla: The MVP pattern
  • Ian Cooper: Best Practices for TDD

The first presenter covered some techniques for dealing with integration points with a database. I noticed that he used Coderush (all those bright colours and arrows hurts my eyes!) instead of Resharper though I think he was using VS2008. It seems that Coderush also lacks a way of extracting a class into a file for a different assembly or at least it wasn’t used. I’m pleased the presenter used BDD styled should as I’ve found these help focus the person writing the test. He finished with some very useful tips though I was worried by one of his final statements, “Avoid Integration Tests”. I think as a principle, fine. For someone in the early stages of learning TDD (think of the Shu in the Shu Ha Ri), it’s a dangerous blanket statement they may follow as integration tests can be useful points of feedback as well.

The second presenter talked about the Model View Presenter Pattern although after seeing his implementation, and I think it is probably more an example of both the Supervising Controller and the Presentation Model. I find it interesting to see how far Sebastien pushed the databinding features of ASP.Net. It’s given me some thought about how I might actually give databinding another real chance. I’m really interested to see how this works in an update mode in this same world. I also learned here that the Macbook Air isn’t great for doing presentations where you need to write code (the buttons are too small!)

The final presenter, Ian Cooper talked over lots of best practices around Test Driven Development. Ian has plenty of great things to say and one of my only issues was that there was probably far too much content on the slides to cover in just an hour.

One of the other topics that wasn’t covered and I think is important for newbies to TDD is understanding when to or when not to use it. As I wrote in a previous post, if you’re doing TDD all the time, you’re doing something wrong.

I really enjoyed talking to other people who went along and I’ll definitely be back again sometime.

Some notes on C# 3.0

I’ve been playing around with some of the new features of C#3.0. I installed VS2008 and the new Resharper 4.0 EAP available here. I expect most of the Jetbrains EAP stuff to be pretty buggy and I’ve already had it crash on me more than five times today. Still, being able to refactor and navigate around files is worth the buggy trial.

Out of the box support for the new language features looks interesting as well as some of the new tools and refactorings in place. Interestingly, default settings suggests constant use of the new var keyword replacing the class declaration you should be using. I’m a little uncomfortable with this as the default setting though it could be because I’m not used to seeing C# code like that.

I started playing around with extension methods, trying to convert the ReflectUtil I wrote back in this post. After a rewrite, some of the APIs looked a bit better although at the cost of making some private inner classes and delegates public. I’m not sure if I like it yet and still trying to think of some guidelines for when to use it. I think definitely having all the extension methods grouped together would help – either in one big Extension class (if you don’t have too many) or in a [Class]Extension class so they’re much easier to locate. If you find youreself writing StringUtil classes, consider converting them to Extension classes. Right now, extension methods only work on instances, so if you want to be able to add static methods, vote on the topic here. I’m not yet convinced it’s that useful just yet though.

Lambda expressions look especially nice although now it’s just plain confusing how you have three ways to do something and there’s really little benefit out of the two more verbose ways. Use this to replace anonymous delegates with a less verbose method.

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