Head On

I came back last night after two great days of conferencing at Smidig2007 in Oslo, Norway. The mornings where all lightning talks and the afternoons where reserved for open space discussions. I gave a lighnting talk on the experiences we have had at WeMind trying to implement a lean enterprise, and I initiated two open space sessions, one on the GUI artists role in an agile process and the other on what makes different languages have so different communities and cultures. I will expand on those in later posts.

During the two days I had the pleasure of hooking up with Niclas Nilsson, Aslak Hellesøy and a bunch og other great people. It was very stimulating discussions and I am really motivated into doing a few new things with our own testing/speccing.

It was all in norwegian, so all you non-scandinavian speakers out there are really missing out on something - finally a reason to take that class in swedish or norwegian you always thought about.

Photos and a few deeper comments are due later, but for now: a big thanks to my norwegian friends for a great time.

I just got a mail confirming that I will not speak at RailsConf Europe this fall. I had submitted a proposal named “Version Control in Rails using Mercurial” which was going to show the benefits of using a distributed version control system when developing a Rails app. My opening line would have been “Hi, I am Marcus and I have been Subversion free for six months”.

For some weird reason, so many people in the Rails community - and the open source community as whole - still talk about Subversion as something great. It is not. Subversion is decent at best if you are comfortable knowing that you are using second or third best tools, but believe me, it is a crap choice knowing the alternatives in distributed version control.

I really wanted to point all this out to the a larger audience so that we maybe will move beyond the Subversion centric mess which is the Rails community today. Oh well, maybe next year.

For a very entertaining and opinionated view on version control systems, watch Linus Torvalds most awesome presentation on Git at Google.

Sitting in Stockholm reading blogs, it feels like being home on a friday night knowing that there is a great party going on and you are not going.