So we didn’t check messages until Tuesday, and lo and behold, there was a message from one of the attendants on our American Airlines flight where I lost my phone. They found it! It’s shipping back to me. I am glad they found it, but I don’t know what shape it’ll be in when I get it. Fingers crossed…

The final day was upon me all too soon. We had a helpful discussion on using web standards, which reminded me that I must pick up a copy of Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards. We also discussed AJAX, Flex, and Flash, unpacking the tradeoffs between them and the limitations of AJAX for Rich Internet Applications. We wrapped with a recap and summary roundtable where everyone summarized their take-away from the conference. Very worthwhile, and I would most definitely do one of these again.

Code Quality, Mentoring, Enterprise Software Management, and mixing Java and .Net carried the day. The format we adapted today was excellent for these topics; we went in roundtable fashion and each participant shared what they do to ensure quality and mentor. After hearing Ben Geyer talk about XRadar, I definitely have to get that set up on my projects at the client site. Someone mentioned the idea of “a build breakage is a line stoppage”; I think it may have been Andrew Moore. That was an interesting concept and hearing how it was carried out in Andrew’s instance was beneficial. Here are the points I shared about quality:

In my consulting/development work

• Reiterating the “sign your work” principle of Pragmatic Programming
• Discipline as a necessary quality; the ability to do what is required for good software yet isn’t fun, intriguing, or stimulating to a narrow attention span
• Use a world-readable version control repository
• Publish the Javadoc and unit test reports to the project website
• Use Checkstyle to enforce conventions
• Use peer reviews for code releases that push to production
• Solid unit/integration/functional testing

This was probably the most public setting where I have shared my observation on unit testing, probably my most original (and distinctly Southern) perspective on quality:

Unit tests are like toilet paper; they have it everywhere I go, but the quality varies widely from place to place.

In my Debian work

• Domain-specific code checkers, lintian and linda
• Using IRC and Nopaste for remote collaboration

Day two of the conference was equally rich. We kicked off the morning with Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), Object Design, and Agile User Requirements (read User Stories). I weighed in on my opinion of MDA as a lost cause; that stems largely from my close brushes with OptimalJ while subcontracting through Compuware. I think this was the point where I shared that if software development ever became so devoid of its aspects of art and craft that reliable, flexible, scalable, and maintainable software were crafted simply from drawing UML diagrams, I would leave the trade and pursue something else, like being a brickmason. No kidding, that’s really what I think. At the point that this field became that miserable and devoid of soul, I’d want out. I have interviewed a couple of long-time programmers who are currently using WebLogic Integration (WLI), my inclinations about MDA’s promises have been confirmed. Bruce made some comments about MDA related to linear algebra and Gödel’s Theorem that I’d love to see unpacked in a blog entry or article sometime.

I spoke about user stories at length (maybe too much) and how they have been more worthwhile to me than use cases in providing low barriers to entry for requirements participation from business persons as well as technical persons. We also talked about how user stories break down the work into easily-prioritizable chunks of work that fit well within iterative development. Mike Cohn’s User Stories Applied For Agile Software Development has been my invaluable reference in adopting user stories.

Agile Software Development was a natural segue. Regrettably, my notes are rather sparse. Must’ve been talking too much again 8^). I came away with quite a list of books and tools to check out:

• Slack : Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency - Tom deMarco
• Peopleware - deMarco and Lister
• Domain-Driven Design - Eric Evans
• Secrets of Consulting - Gerald M. Weinberg
• Don’t Make Me Think - Steve Krug

• CPD - Copy Paste Detector (component of PMD)
• EyeTracker - inexpensive visual tracking feedback

It appears that this conference will be everything I had hoped. The group is small and refreshingly cross-disciplined. We have folks from large enterprise shops, mid-range consultancies using Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python, and solo developers from several disciplines. There’s even a ColdFusion person!

The OpenSpaces conference format is already fulfilling its promises. We had a full docket of topics before we even had our first break!

In the afternoon session we had a good discussion about Content Management Frameworks/Systems. It’s interesting to me to see Drupal, Wordpress, Plone, and others now being referred as Content Management Frameworks instead of Content Management Systems. I hypothesized that perhaps it was because of issues with clients who expected a CMS to be something akin to off-the-shelf software packages that are just installed and then ready-to-use. With the shift to “framework” instead of “system”, the idea of a need for customization and buildout is more clearly expressed. I gave heavy endorsement to Drupal as a CMS. I have heard that some people were using Wordpress as a CMS, and there were a few folks with clients doing that.