Head On

1996 revisited

2009-04-15T00:00:00+02:00

After receiveing what I believe was the third promotional email from my beloved mobile phone operator, showing this not-so-useful information

I was curious to see what sort of HTML did not even render images in Safari.

Behold:

 1 </span>Sista chansen: Specialpris på Telia Mobilt bredband<span class="nt">
       2  target="_blank">
       3 
       4  http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
       5  content="MSHTML 6.00.5730.13&quot; name=GENERATOR>
       6  bgColor=#818177 leftMargin=0 topMargin=0 marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">
       7  height="100%" cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" bgColor=#818177 border=0>
       8 
       9  vAlign=top align=middle>
      10  style="FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-SIZE: 10px; COLOR: #505050; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif&quot;>Ser mailet konstigt ut?  style="FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-SIZE: 10px; COLOR: #cf0566; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif&quot; href="#" target=_blank>Klicka här »

11 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=590 align=center bgColor=#aaaaa4 border=0> 12 13 vAlign=top align=middle> href="http://tr.anp.se/track?t=c&mid=250386&uid=124849854&&&http://track.adform.net/C/?bn=212313" target=_blank> alt="Nu höjer vi hastigheten och sänker priset." src="http://adata.attraction.se/Telia/buss14/09-Utskick_v15/images/erbj1.jpg" border=0> 14 15 vAlign=top align=middle> href="http://tr.anp.se/track?t=c&mid=250386&uid=124849854&&&http://track.adform.net/C/?bn=212313" target=_blank> alt="Nu höjer vi hastigheten och sänker priset." src="http://adata.attraction.se/Telia/buss14/09-Utskick_v15/images/erbj2.jpg" border=0> 16 17 vAlign=top align=middle> href="http://tr.anp.se/track?t=c&mid=250386&uid=124849854&&&http://track.adform.net/C/?bn=212313" target=_blank> alt="Nu höjer vi hastigheten och sänker priset." src="http://adata.attraction.se/Telia/buss14/09-Utskick_v15/images/erbj3.jpg" border=0> 18 19 vAlign=top align=middle> href="http://tr.anp.se/track?t=c&mid=250386&uid=124849854&&&http://track.adform.net/C/?bn=212313" target=_blank> alt="Nu höjer vi hastigheten och sänker priset." src="http://adata.attraction.se/Telia/buss14/09-Utskick_v15/images/erbj4.jpg" border=0>
20 style="FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-SIZE: 10px; COLOR: #505050; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif">Vill du inte få fler erbjudanden från Telia till denna epostadress, style="FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-SIZE: 10px; COLOR: #cf0566; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif" href="http://www.anp.se/oa/250386/4342584B72474751437243465143" target=_blank>klicka här » 21 border=0 width=1 height=1 src="http://www.anp.se/Clicks.asp?sqid=250386&sid=124849854&pf_action=View&pf_Link=">

Wow - it is like a time machine to 1996. MSHTML did supposedly generate it.

ThoughWorks Free Seminars in Stockholm

2009-04-07T00:00:00+02:00

ThoughtWorks will give two free seminars at Berns Tuesday April 21 2009.

The morning one is given by me and will be on the business value of agile and lean, and how it can be the competitive advantage in difficult times.

In the afternoon my colleague Zack Exley will give a behind-the-scenes look at the technological side of the Barack Obama campaign.

Both of the talks will be kicked off by our chairman Roy Singham who will give his view on why he believes Scandinavia has a great future in the software development world.

You are welcome to attend either one of these - or both of course.

For registration and more info please visit: http://connect.thoughtworks.com/stockholmEvent/

Simple beats complicated

2009-04-05T00:00:00+02:00

Peter Krantz sent this clip from a Capoeira fight (rating: violent) which I see as a really good analogy for XP’s YAGNI and the simplest thing that could possibly work.

ThoughtWorks Hosts A Track and Speaks At Scandinavian Developer Conference

2009-01-22T00:00:00+01:00

ThoughtWorks cohosting and speaking at the Emerging Technologies track at the Scandinavian Developer Conference. Ola will speak about JRuby and I will give a presentation with a title stolen from XP: ‘The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work’.

It is a one day conference which I am really looking forward to - Kent Beck keynoting is reason enough to be there. See the full program here.

ThoughtWorks Sweden Gets A Roommate

2009-01-13T00:00:00+01:00

ThoughtWorks Sweden will move in with our great friends at Agical at the end of this month. Our new address will be

ThoughtWorks Sweden
Västerlånggatan 79 2tr
111 29 Stockholm
Sweden

Personally it will be the first time I have an office in Old Town - cool.

Playing to win, culture style

2009-01-12T00:00:00+01:00

This Saturdays edition of Dagens Industri had a really interesting column by Jan Åman, former curator of Färgfabriken. He writes about how you can either move forward or secure your back, and how the world is run by people watching their backs and making sure that decisions can never be questioned.

It is very close my favorite XP slogan “playing to win” and what I talk about in my presentation on Agile Documentation. A good read, but unfortunately only in the paper edition.

Quoted in Computer Sweden

2008-12-17T00:00:00+01:00

I am quoted in todays issue of Computer Sweden on BDD. It is a well written article even if I do not agree with Emil Gustafssons quote in the end where he states that BDD doesn’t bring that much new things to the table. I think that people looking at BDD for the first time might perceive it as such, but I must say that there is a clear difference in both approach and outcome.

Agile Sweden Christmas Party

2008-12-09T00:00:00+01:00

The Agile Sweden annual christmas party is on Thursday at the Agical office. The evening will kick off with a few lightning talks, of which I am doing one. My talk is titled “The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work” and will discuss how XP’s value of simplicity has more or less been forgotten as agile has gone mainstream.

Symptoms vs. Causes

2008-12-08T00:00:00+01:00

There latest storm in the teacup that is Swedish IT is caused by the national news agency TT decision to move from OpenOffice to Microsoft Office, mainly because ‘I (head of development) do not want to sit here wondering how I will connect OpenOffice with a hundred eleven other systems’. I believe ‘a hundred eleven’ is a long form for ‘a lot’.

This has in almost deterministic fashion caused people from both sides of the OSS-MS divide to wave their party flags. But no one asks the to me more obvious question - why do you connect your office suite with all those systems, and why is that a problem if you do not have Microsoft Office? Seems more like an architecture question if you ask me.

Smidig Videos Are Up

2008-12-02T00:00:00+01:00

The videos from Smidig 2008 are up. This is mine (in Swedish):

Icebears Out, Polar Bears In

2008-11-30T00:00:00+01:00

Aslak reminded me that there is no such thing as an icebear. Tag line changed.

Words don’t come easy: MoSCoW and BDD

2008-11-26T00:00:00+01:00

I had a interesting conversation with Kevlin Henney at Øredev regarding the word ‘should’ and its usage in Behaviour Driven Development. Kevlin does not like ‘should’ as he feels it is too vague in many circumstances. And I have to agree with Kevlin.

Sometime you are speccing something like “the title of the index page should be ‘blabbr.com - the worlds largest social network’”, which might be something that we will change in the future. ‘Should’ is a good choice of words here.

Another time the spec says ‘when the nuclear reactor overheats it should shut down.’. ‘Should’ is not a good choice of word here. I’d much rather say that the nuclear reactor must shutdown, as to really say that we have no other option.

So, let’s use both. Use ‘should’ when describing a something might change, and ‘must’ when describing something carved in rock.

This might also help using the specs as an executable requirement. At the moment all specs are valued the same, every fail breaks the build. Perhaps there is a value in saying that certain specs are really important and should never fail. We could have different colors for different types of failure.

Perhaps there is a use for the rest of MoSCoW?

Thoughts?

Going to Øredev

2008-11-15T00:00:00+01:00

My Friday morning inbox contained an email from Niclas Nilsson asking me to replace him doing interviews for InfoQ at Øredev. It took some planning calls to my wife and booking of babysitting, but now I am good to go.

I will be interviewing these six gentlemen:

Jon Bostrom
Walter Bright
James Bach
Roger Sullivan
Luke Hohmann
BJ Hargrave

Let me know if you have any question you would like me to ask.

Going to JAOO

2008-09-08T00:00:00+02:00

I will be at JAOO this year, telling everyone who is interested all about ThoughtWorks Sweden. Last time I went to JAOO was 2001, so I am really looking forward to it.

I will probably spend quite some time in the ThoughtWorks booth, so come by and say hi. Or beat me in the IT-run which I have signed up for.

Speaking at Smidig 2008

2008-09-08T00:00:00+02:00

I am happy to say that I will give one of the lightning talks at Smidig 2008. My presentation is about optimizing the whole product chain, from concept to cash, and stop focusing on projects as they fragment the organization and cause local optimization.

Last years conference was great and inspired us here in Stockholm to do our own version in the form of Agila Sverige. I am really looking forward to going back to Oslo.