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.

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!

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.

WebSockets: OMG! Someone broke the internet!

So we’ve finally worked out how to build massively scalable internet applications. REST and Resource Oriented Architectures are proving hugely successful; but the Internet is changing. WebSockets are a W3C supported protocol that offer developers greater flexibility when implementing the next generation of internet applications. This flexibility doesn’t come without cost. The speaker will explore the practical applications of the WebSocket protocol, it’s limitations and the impact on internet-scale software engineering. This talk is targeted at Developers, Technical Leaders and Architects. There may even be some code.