The Bovine Synchrotron

The event was a great success – thanks to everyone who came along and thanks to the organisers, in particular Alex Shaw (@axshaw) for putting on an excellent first local event.

Apparently something of a trend on the conference circuit at the moment, the event featured local artist Anthony Ashley
(@tweetBedders I believe) live painting the themes from the talks. The result is below – I kinda like it.

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I’ve been asked to present at the Agile Peterborough meetup this Wednesday, 20th March.

I’m really pleased that the organisers have asked me and that we have had so many folks register for the event. There is a growing software development and craftsmanship community centered on companies based in and around Peterborough and I’m delighted to support the group.

The talk is one of my favourites, Lean and Lego – Building the Millenium Falcon. I’ve given this previously for both clients and at Agile on the Beach and it’s always a fun topic.

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I have an upcoming tutorial at QCon San Francisco on Micro services. It’s scheduled for Tuesday the 6th November for the full day. The tutorial will cover evolutionary architecture, web-integration, declarative provisioning of environments and tooling that allows us to create and operationalise simple and small applications.

Promo Code: lewi100

If you want to come along, then please use my speaker code when booking; you’ll get a $100 discount on your ticket which has to be a good thing.

Micro services – evolutionary approaches for systems of systems

“Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together” was accepted 40 years ago yet we have spent the last decade building monolithic applications, communicating via bloated middleware and with our fingers crossed that Moore’s Law keeps helping us out. There is a better way.

Micro services. In this tutorial we will discover a consistent and reinforcing set of tools and practices rooted in the the Unix Philosophy of small and simple. Tiny applications, communicating via the web’s uniform interface with single responsibilities and installed as well behaved operating system services. So, are you sick of wading through tens of thousands of lines of code to make a simple one line change? Of all that XML? Come along and check out what the cools kids are up to (and the cooler grey beards).

In this tutorial we will cover the following topics:

Principle-driven evolutionary architecture
Capability modelling and the town planning metaphor
REST, web integration and event-driven systems of systems
Micro services, versioning, consumer driven contracts and postels law
Testing, Building and continuous delivery
Operational concerns

There will be a hands-on element to the tutorial looking at some basic tooling that allows us to very quickly create and operationalise micro-service based designs. Bring a laptop!

event links

QCon San Francisco Main Page
www.qconsf.com

Registration

https://secure.trifork.com/sf2012/registration/

Tracks

http://qconsf.com/sf2012/tracks/

Twitter

https://twitter.com/#!/QConSF

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/QCon

james events, micro-services, qcon micro-services, qcon, tutorials

I was lucky enough to be invited back to Agile on the Beach for a second year and gave a talk on Growing a culture of innovation.

The basic premise is that in todays ever more connected world, it’s becoming more and more important for companies to innovate to retain their market share but its notoriously hard to create a culture where innovation can prosper using traditional management techniques. My opinion? You can’t create culture, but you can put people, an organisational architecture and routines in place that allow a culture to grow.

My slides on the talk can be found on slideshare here and the full synopsis on the talks page. Video will be available shortly and will be added when it is.

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I was asked to present this year at the 33rd Degree conference on Java Micro-services and i’ve finally managed to get the slides up on slideshare.

You can find them here.

I would like to thank the conference organisers since I had a really interesting week with some great feedback. I really need to write a bit more on the topic since it seemed the topic was useful and interesting for people.

Thanks everyone who attended. Hope to see you again next year.

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With my colleague Ian Cartwright, I recently delivered a talk on programming language adoption at ThoughtWorks EU Quarterly Technology Briefing.

The video can be found here

Synopsis

Gone are the days when your company was limited to C++ or Java. The last few years have seen an explosion of programming languages promising “10x more productivity” or a “quicker return on investment” but what is the reality behind these claims? Programming language choice has an impact far beyond the immediate, after all COBOL applications still perform billions of business critical transactions every day and an estimated 86-94%* of software cost is incurred post development. In addition, the world of computing is changing, Moore’s Law still holds, but in an unexpected way – we can no longer rely on faster CPUs to boost performance, instead we need to have multiple CPU cores. So what does this mean for language choice in the Enterprise? This Quarterly Technology Briefing will explore these dilemmas and offer practical advice on how to balance often opposing concerns; stability vs innovation; fast to market vs easy to maintain; fashion vs staff retention; etc. We’ll do this by looking at historical motivations for changing patterns of language use and ask which of those, alongside which new forces and pressures should we be considering today.

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I’m chuffed that I’ve been asked to speak at the 33rd Degree conference which runs 19th – 21st of March in Krakow, Poland.
I’m going to be speaking on building micro services in java – something I’ve been advocating for a while (and will get around to writing up sometime soon…). Talk synopsis follows:

Micro services – Java, the Unix Way

“Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together” was accepted 40 years ago yet we have spent the last decade building monolithic applications, communicating via bloated middleware and with our fingers crossed that Moore’s Law keeps helping us out. There is a better way.

Micro services. In this talk we will discover a consistent and reinforcing set of tools and practices rooted in the the Unix Philosophy of small and simple. Tiny applications, communicating via the web’s uniform interface with single responsibilities and installed as well behaved operating system services. So, are you sick of wading through tens of thousands of lines of code to make a simple one line change? Of all that XML? Come along and check out what the cools kids are up to (and the cooler grey beards).

This is a talk about building micro-services using simple java tools

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Update: The talk went really well I’m pleased to say. I guess Lego and Star Wars really appeals to most geeks…
Video and slides can be found here

I’d like to say a big thank you to the organisers – a first event and an unquestionable success.

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Upcoming talk: Lean and Lego – Building the Millenium Falcon
Location: Agile on the Beach – Cornwall
Dates: 15th – 16th September

I’m really pleased to be giving a talk on lean practices at the 2011 Agile on the beach conference. The talk is a slightly irreverent one, using our experiences at ThoughtWorks London of building the largest Lego set ever produced to introduce the ideas of self organisation, continuous improvement and lean practices. I’ll cover a bunch of more involved ideas from Lean too – cycle time and the like. I’m dead chuffed, as the speaker list is good and the location promises to be beautiful.

If you are interested in Agile Development or Software Engineering and live in the South West, or even want a break on the beach whilst seeing world class keynote speakers (not me) then come along – it should be fun.

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I’m participating in a bit of light-hearted fun this evening in the ThoughtWorks London office when we host a geek night with the subject of the real-time web.

There will be two “talks” – though it won’t just be powerpoint, never fear there will be demo’s too.

I’ll mainly be talking about Websockets and the stuff you need to think about when using this technology as well as demoing a performance testing tool that uses a bit of BOSH and a bit of XMPP.

It won’t just be me though, Meinhard Benn, a Strophe committer will be talking / demoing too. Personally that’s the bit I’m excited about.

Sign up at the site above and come along!

james events internet, push, talks, web, websockets

I am about to fly home this evening after spending the last week in the ThoughtWorks Brazil office and at Agile Brazil where I was speaking on agile adoption.

Agile Brazil was a great success, and I’d like to offer my thanks and congratulations to the organisers of the event. 800+ folk came to hear locals and some international speakers talk about agile software development. The ThoughtWorks booth was busy the whole time and it’s clear we have a very strong brand here.

It’s been a great trip – spending time with my Brazillian colleagues has been an absolute blast, both old-skool ThoughtWorks folk and the talented and passionate new joiners here.

Highlights include highjacking a big screen in the comp-sci department of the University so that Martin Fowler and I could watch an England game, my first experience of BBQ’d cheese, giving a talk to a room that sits 1200; and meat. So much meat.

Thanks to those that made my stay such a good experience, too many to name but Danilo, Paulo, Carlos V, Phil, Amit, Gary * 2, Greg, Caio, Camila, Pat and Sameer all made me feel very welcome. Special thanks to Verônica who made sure this gringo wasn’t completely lost when out and about in Porto Alegre.

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