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 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.
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.
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.
Aslak reminded me that there is no such thing as an icebear. Tag line changed.
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:
Let me know if you have any question you would like me to ask.
ThoughtWorks Sweden has come a long way since I last posted anything about it. We have ourselves a nice office downtown, with proper phone numbers and pretty business cards.
This means that we are available for consulting gigs, primarily in Stockholm, but we can serve basically all of Scandinavia. With ThoughtWorks global organization behind us, we offer software delivery in Java, Ruby and .Net as well as agile coaching and consulting. We are also keen to show off our products Mingle, Cruise and Twist.
Call us, email us, come by the office for a coffee or lunch. We look forward to hearing from you.
ThoughtWorks
Mäster Samuelsgatan 60, 8 tr.
111 21 Stockholm
Office: +46 8 5500 2100
Skype me: mahnve
email me: mahnve at thoughtworks dot com
Jonathan Schwartz writes about finance as a technology business
I remember a dinner I had a while back with the CEO of a global financial services firm. As one of his first acts as CEO, he’d cancelled an enormous outsourcing contract, and I’d asked him why – his response has stuck with me. ‘Banking is a technology business. Pure and simple. I can’t win if I don’t have my own team.’
Independent of his views on outsourcing, I’ve heard the same point made by many (but not all) financial services executives – banking (like big swaths of telecommunications, media and retailing) has become a technology business, where every ounce of performance and differentiation matters. Even, and especially, in the midst of market turmoil.
Which is why you should use consultants that can help you improve your game, not play the game for you.
(Via Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog.)
Not everybody was following the Euro 2008 final:
Congrats to Spain for a well deserved win anyway. I’ll tell Peter about it over lunch tomorrow.
Projektplatsen.se reminds me that it has been more than 8 years, or 2932 days to be exact, since I logged in the last time. So I agree with them when they say that I lot has happened since then 
.
This is my kind of modern grassroots politics: Use the Internet which they want to control to do to them as they do to us.
Football on BBC’s excellent live streaming service, Stevenote on IRC. Twitter is very much down as expected.
If you are in the Stockholm area and in need to move your teeth around ever so slightly, look no further than Vasastans Tandreglering. You will get truly professional treatment which will leave your teeth in those straight lines you dream of.
Of course this is my moms new business I am talking about. Good luck mom, you’re the best.
JFokus has the traditional format of speakers talking for an hour, which is way too long. Every speaker I have listened to has spent more than half of their allotted time providing context and explaining why they are talking about whatever they are talking about.
I so wish that they would have used lightning talks.
Jon is leaving ThoughtWorks to join Google
Jon is one of the most brilliant people I have been fortunate enough to work with. Congratulations to Google to have hired him.
There is one thing that strikes me in the Sun MySQL thingy – what about Sun’s previous commitment to PostgreSQL, where they say stuff like: “PostgreSQL for Solaris 10 is the open source enterprise database platform of choice”?
Tim Bray comments on the deal and totally dismisses any alternatives:
MySQL, you know, in my experience, it, well, Just Works. Runs great on our hardware and OS. Well, OK, GNU/Linux too. What else is there? For databases, nothing that matters.
I strongly prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL, and I have previously used Sun as a reference for it. Perhaps no more.
There is an iPhone for sale on the swedish site Blocket:
Funny part translated from swedish: “… I can include the telephone number to my friend who helped me unlock it”
They actually do say that, here in Sweden. In a brochure handed out at SIME07, Google provides a little glossary for the technically challenged, and to my amusement JavaScript is described as follows:
JavaScript – scripting language for those who are not programmers, in first hand intended for creating web pages.
The translation is mine. The original text in Swedish: “JavaScript – skriptsprÃ¥k för de som inte är programmerare, som i första hand är avsett för att skapa webbsidor”
This is of course a mistake, and my guess is that mistakes like these are inevitable if you have local offices like the one is Stockholm without technical knowledge. I find it funny, but I wonder if Sergey and Larry would laugh if they were to find out?
I just talked to Sid Pinney and Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks, and it seems that ThoughtWorks might open an office in Sweden. That would be a welcome injection to the swedish consulting market where too many players favor quantity over quality.
I spent last evening at an Andy Hunt seminar organized by Valtech Sweden. Andy delivered a very good presentation on “How hard can it be” handling the topic of complexity and how we as developers often make our jobs harder than they are. Highly recommended.