tfnico's blog

I'm quite busy these days doing preperations for *a big change in my life* that will be the subject of my next blog-post , but I figured I'd give a quick status update that's a bit too big for my twitter stream . I was recently appointed to lead Objectware's Java-department's focus group on Agile . We've been doing agile for a long while on the company level, but it's first now that our department has its own group on it. My goal is to nurture it to being a very active micro-community that will produce knowledge both internally and externally. Much like we already did, but now with more, well, budget :) Our first accomplishment was to attend the Smidig 2008 conference with a respectable amount of Objectware speakers . There were alot of interesting discussions going on in the succeeding open spaces, my favourite topics incuded some hard-core web-testing (of course), when (not to) re-use and some others I can't remember right now. As part of my new ...

This post is going to a bit about what I've been doing lately. Well, like any other developer I've been mostly busy with getting the projects released before the big July. But I've also been past-timing a bit on setting up a new wiki. Yay, I don't have to be the wiki techie any more! It's been well over a year since I started managing Objectware's Confluence installation . As expected, it was very little work. Confluence basically runs itself once it's set up. Mostly it was upgrading, administering content (deleting and cleaning), doing the odd restart or log-watching. Eventually, after a year or so, the hosting of the wiki was outsourced to a nearby hosting company, cause our instance's database was starting to run a bit slow, and my billing rates were a bit high (hey, I'm a consultant, after all) :) So good riddance, finally no more booring IT-support work. Or do I... Well, not until two months later, anyway. I was asked by a colleague, who's ...

Recent activities eating away blog-activity include mostly JAFS - our annual internal weekend getaway. JAFS essentially means hauling our ~40 Java-programming colleagues off to a desolate hotel for a weekend, doing not so much else than having fun programming (and shooting some paintball). The concept of the weekend's tasks are based on the following: Divide the gang into 5 groups Present some technologies that are core , meaning everyone of us should know by heart (for instance Spring and Maven) Present some new technologies that are hot , and might come in handy in the near future (for instance JRuby and OpenESB) Do some cool programming competition that makes use of above technologies These points demand a mass of preperations. We've been 5 people spending evenings and weekends planning the event for the last month. First we spent a whole load of time settling on which tehcnologies to focus on. See we've got four different camps of technology groups in Objectware, each o...

I'm just back from a great weekend in Tønsberg ! We've got this inner circle in our Java department called (duh) Core Java, and every once in a while we pack up, head for some desolate place and nerd away for the entire weekend. This was another weekend like that (although Tønsberg is not as desolate as I had expected, more of a classic south-of-Norway town with great clubs and people). We stayed at the hotel by the water side, not the greatest view but good since I haven't been around the ocean half as much as I would've like this summer (bad weather in Norway this year). So, we got checked in on friday and fiddled around with AOP, our man Sergei gave us a taste of what he's going to present at JavaZone this year. Don't miss it. After that we headed out for beer, gin and tonic. Day two included a presentation of Spring's Java Config which was followed by an interesting discussion on Spring, Guice and testability of Java configured modules. We had a sessi...

You might've noticed another fall in the number of posts here lately, because yet again it is time for summer vacation. I've now been vacating for a week, and it feels like I've been away for a month. So, in order to keep my fingers warm, I'm semi-planning the arrangment for 9 new Java-developers we're receiving in the beginning of August. The reason I dug into this job of training the newly recruited is obivously that I want to turn these new peeps into miniature versions of myself. They're (mostly) fresh out of university, are all smart and pleasant people (I met them on a couple of previous occasions), and seem like good potential mini-me's ;) Jokes aside, I have a strong opinion on how new guys and gals should receive the most basic knowledge and in what order this should happen. Personally I was quite abrubtly launched onto a customer's site, but luckily I had a couple of years of experience in the right direction, so I already had basic stuff like ...

I was recently contacted by Atlassian's Wiki Evangelist (yes, appearantly that's a real title!), Stewart Mader. He asked me to consider their new site, Wikipatterns.com , and also forward the site to my dear readership. Done! In other but related news, I've been (somewhat unwillingly) appointed our next Confluence administrator. This means I'll be given full control over the wiki (muhuhaha) , meaning in effect I'll be able to try out new plug-ins, manage spaces, bully people around, etc. It also means I'll have to do upgrades, booring user adminstration, figure out funky stacktraces that are appearing in Confluence for some odd reason, fix the database, etc, etc. The main reason I have volunteered to do this job is that no-one else wanted to do it, and I believe our Wiki is far too critical to leave in the hands of our IT service provider like our CTO would've had it. When are you people gonna understand that Windows is not meant for hosting? Additionally, ...

This tuesday I'm going to do a workshop on wiki for some people in management/business development department. We've been smart enough to choose Confluence for our internal wiki, and its use has been growing steadily ever since last summer, bout the same time as I joined the company. Over this time I've managed to earn the rep of a wiki-evangelist within the company. This is probably I've taken the time to learn the in's and out's of Confluence content formatting, making pretty layouts with columns and tables, galleries, RSS-feeds, and intranet blogging. Some people think I spend too much time fiddling around with it (see for instance the screenshot of my personal space page), but I think it's fun and interesting to try out. I'm not doing it to evangelize the whole company into going crazy on wiki-usage, I just use the wiki to cover my own butt mostly. If I didn't write things down in the wiki, I'd very quickly fall into the state of corporate ...

As I wrote in my previous post I've been through my yearly evaluation at work. In short it was a 4-hour talk with my team-leader where we went through different aspects of my performance, such as development abilities, people skills, and so on. Now such an evaluation might sound like a bit of a harsh Americanized performance indicator that decides my pay-check, but I appreciated getting honest feedback and ideas on areas where I can improve. Note that one important prerequisite for doing this sort of evaluation is having a team-leader you trust, not being the same person as the one who finally decides your pay-check ;) After the evaluation of last year's achievements, we set out to decide this year's goals. We arrived at me reading quite a few books, doing some internal as well as external presentations, delivering some projects and participating on a couple of courses. All these goals were formalized with concrete objectives, and will be easy to measure throughout the year...

To all you Oslo-based readers, students at ifi in particular: Objectware is gonna participate with a talk on http://dagen.ifi.uio.no ! And not just any one of them either, but Totto 'imself (president of JavaBin, JavaZone Scandinavia's only Java Champion - in other words, the biggest Java-celeb in these snowy parts of the world). If you are interested in Java, or system development in general, I highly recommend you catch that talk! Øyvind Bø Syrstad (buddy and colleague) will also participate in the talk. Dagen@ifi is on 26th of October, and takes place at the University of Oslo's Institute of Informatics. I don't have the opportunity to participate on the earlier happenings, but will arrive later in the evening to share a great deal of red wine with the rest of last year's Dagen-crew ;)

Updated with hyperlinks Day 1 Well, I didn't go to Bjørn's presentation anyway for some reason. Some chaos at the stand, and I dropped into the presentation on Matisse . Long story short, this stuff is Visual Studio five years ago, the live demo botched terribly, and I did a walk-out after about 20 minutes. Geertjan explained why in his blog , and it looked like a dependancy management problem. Snap out of it, guys. Ditch Ant and start using Maven . Still, looking at the state of Swing, I'm glad I'm doing web-apps. Then I took some time off to handle stand-chaos, and eat with Erling (old student buddy) who I haven't met in a while. I was also in the Meet-The-Gurus: MVC framework smackdown with Arjen Poutsma (Interface 21/Spring MVC), Rickard Öberg (creator of WW) and Kaare Nilsen (JSF). Was interesting to see how the MVC frameworks (or web frameworks as I prefer to call them) could be divided into several channels of motivation, and thus is the reason we have so ...

Updated with hyperlinks Was at Bruce Johnson's talk on Google WTK . Cool stuff, Google, nuff said. Will have to try it out. Then on to Jevgeni Kabanov's talk on Arenea . Interesting ideas, but I don't really think this is anything ready for prod. I'm an OO guy, so I can really see the use of using more OO in webapps. Might try this out next year if it's still alive. Took a one session break. Now in Bruce Tate's Java/Ruby integration talk . So far doing very well being diplomatic towards java (perhaps very wisely). Alotta RoR demonstration, and the ReST stuff was of course impressive. Tate is by the way one helluva talker. Sounds a bit like an American president (scaringly smoothly convincing type), but I think he's Texan, after all :) Now I've stumbled into Ross Mason's Mule/JavaSpaces . The nickle in his shoe is handling meta-data for web services. but ESBs, or was it WSDLs, don't provide this too well. Now normally I like to stay clear ...

Righto, wednesday is the big day! JavaZone really looks to be one of the coolest Java conferences ever, and it's right here in Oslo! Quite amazing. Will try to blog a bit about the presentations I get to see, but will also be hanging around Objectware's stand alot, eating popcorn (come get some, it's free!).

Coming up is the last week of work for me before the summer, and as last weeks go, I'll probably be too busy to blog about anything interesting. But I'd like to brag that my entire month of July will be spent mostly offline, doing nothing but enjoying the summer in our family's summer-place, as well as digesting the WebWork- and AJAX in Action books. I'm changing employer across the summer, and these technologies are probably the ones I'll be working with at the new place. Have a nice summer, everyone!

I usually don't like meta-blogging (blogging about the concept of blogs), because a lot of other people do it . But today John Udell raised an interesting example of interaction between (in lack of a better general term) enthusiasts as a result of the openness of the web (all the web2.0 thingies like blogs and podcasts, their links, comments and trackbacks). This reminded me of that I dared to write "I've experimented with the use of a blog as an online research tool" in the Method-chapter in my thesis, and continued: While it lacks structure and rigorousness of this thesis, the blog is still chronological through time, and in a way, it represents the research in a more honest way. It also performs the role of a dynamic research tool, as updated resources are available through my blogroll and linkroll. Kristin Helen was the fellow-CMS enthusiast that opened my eyes for getting away with this (by pointing me to this document (1), and now she has in fact publishe...

Having delivered the thesis, I've figured out how I'm going to use this blog. I'm going to continue posting here, writing about web content management, but also about software development in general and other stuff. But the first thing I want to note down are my thoughts on how it was to write the thesis, sharing some writing tips with you. Writing English My first advice is: Don't . Unless its your native language, of course. I have had the pleasure of a bi-lingual upbringing, and seeing the English of many other Norwegians, I'm sorry to that generally, Norwegians write lousy English. Its not that we make grammatical or syntactical errors, but the feeling of the sentence is just.. wrong. And don't be fooled: Word or any other another spell-checker is not good enough. I've gone over another thesis which was already "fixed" by Word, and I still managed to empty a red-ink pen in the process. Another point is that you don't *think* in En...

Righto, April month is closing in fast, and the weight of the current thesis is that most of the stuff which is gonna be delivered is still inside my head, while a minority of it is written into thesis.odt. So for the next month I'm gonna pretty much lock myself inside the closet with a laptop and get the page count up. So there will be very little IM-chatting, programming, partying, social life, and least of all, blogging. The next post will appear soon after I have delivered the thesis, 2nd of May. After that I can officially declare this blog complete :)