Head On

I am thrilled and honored to say that I will be joining ThoughtWorks starting June. Stockholm is the next pin on the ThoughtWorks world map and my job will be heading the operations locally.

The Stockholm office will initially be manned by me and homeward bound Ola, but we plan to find and attract some of the great talent available here.

It is really exciting to become a part of the excellent organization that is ThoughtWorks. I have already had the chance to meet quite a few of my future colleagues who all have shown that ThoughtWorks is made up of great people. Thanks for making me feel welcome.

I am really looking forward to this, it will be hard work and a lot of fun.

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.

• Should I get an iPhone now, or wait for the 3G version? #
• The wire is broken on my DJays headphones - again. This is the second pair I have got as replacement. Great sound - lousy quality. #
• Just had the worst lunch in ages. Stay far, far away from the Bollywood indian erstaurant at Wallingatan in Stockholm #
• html/css hiphop stylee: http://tinyurl.com/38prd3 #

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The Ahnve family spent the afternoon at the Stockholm Technical Museum. It was the last day of the Vintage Gaming exhibition, and man, did they have hardware to reminisce about.

I first stopped by an old Commodore Vic-20, my first computer which my dad bought me in 1983. It was running a Tetris clone, programmed by the computers owner two years ago. He also showed me the flash card add-on card I suppose he soldered himself which replaced the tapedrive. Awesome.

I then met Niklas whom I worked with at TeliaSonera a few years ago. He showed me an Atari 800 and some Nintendo 3D thingy. They even had an original Atari game console from 1976. Wow.

I found a Donkey Kong Game and Watch on sale for SEK 800. So cool.

All this time my wife stood confounded and suggested that they should have a designated place for bored spouses.

After reading Aslaks post on his upcoming conferences it is obvious to me that Stockholm is sorely lacking in the conference space.

Aslak mentions RubyFools in Copenhagen and Oslo, and Smidig 2008 in Oslo. RubyFools seems to be great, and I know that Smidig was awesome in 2007.

The only conference I can think of in Stockholm is JFokus, which I hear is very good but Java only. Looking to the whole of Sweden we have Øredev which I always has found too unfocused, and Expo-C which I cannot tell if they exist anymore.

I guess I have no right complaining if I am not prepared to do anything about it. So, after Smidig 2007 in Oslo, we have had talks within the Agile Sweden network about running a similar conference in Stockholm this spring. And while this is no announcement by any means, I am putting pressure on myself to actually contribute to make it happen by speaking openly about it.

Look out for Agile Sweden 2008 this spring.

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.

I am at the SIME07 conference in Stockholm. It is is a conference focusing on entrepreneurship, media, Internet etcetera, at a pretty high level. At the conferences I normally attend people speak about what thay have done. This one has a lot of “what do you think will happen” going on.

This morning there was a very interesting panel with three venture capitalists on stage, giving feedback to three companies pitches, and VC strategy in general.

Perhaps not spot on for what I do every day, but providing a nice new perspective on things.

Chatting over a beer with Ola Bini last year, we discussed the possibilities for JRuby. My dream was to run a Ruby IDE on top of JRuby to get a Smalltalk like environment, because Smalltalk is still the best programming environment I have ever used.

Now that 3rdRail, running on JRuby, is released, should I get my hopes up? Some people are actually very excited about it, but when Delphi and JBuilder are referred to as some sort of pinnacle of development it seriously makes me wonder.

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.

Spring surprised us early this year, so we are currently blessed with a mild 10ºC. As everyone who has ever experienced it knows, the early days of spring after the long dark winter are just wonderful

The photo is taken with my SE K610i, and stitched together with DoubleTake, which deserves a mentioning. I noticed today that I had lost my license for it, so I sent an email to EchoOne explaining the situation. I got a reply with my license within 4 hours. Great stuff.

I spent yesterday evening at Javaforum. Ola Bini held a great presentation of JRuby that really showed what can be accomplished today and what we can expect in the future.

Ola is not only an über hacker, he is a great guy too. When asked what work is done with Ruby in Sweden today, he was kind enough to mention the work we’ve done at Valtech with Rails, which of course got him a well deserved beer later.

The guys from Interface 21 did a so-so job presenting Spring AOP. I might be biased as I have been in AOP-land and left it, but in my opinion their presentation skills were far better than the actual content.

During after-beer Ola and I discussed the state of Java and agreed that the greatest part of the Java platform is the JVM. It will most probably survive Java the language and be a platform for a multitude of languages. It was therefore funny to read Mike Bowlers blog post today about exactly the same thing.

All in all a good evening.

I will be speaking on the Rails Recipes Meetup here in Stockholm tomorrow. My topic will be on recipe 28 in Chads excellent book, how you can use with_scope to DRY your code.

Whilst I have looked quite deeply into the subject - it is quite small actually - there is one thing I have yet to find out. Chad mentions that you can use wrap your actions with scoping using a before_filter.

The thing is that the author of the patch for nested scopes provides a plugin to enable just that, but he uses an around filter which utilizes funky metaprogramming to do just that. He has a whole blog entry about it.

I’ve asked twice in the IRC channel without any answer, and I’ve posted a question on the books forum.

Does anybody know if a before_filter can be used?

I am really excited about my new position as a consultant at Valtech. After selling software products for five years, I am ready to go back into consulting.

Valtech Stockholm is very strong Java shop and really into agile methodologies. This was the cause of my intitial interest with them. The thing that finally got me though was the interview process which really impressed me. I certainly was not sure that I would get through it myself, and I figured that if everybody working there had passed it, they must be a really exceptional group of people. That impression has intially been confirmed by spending a day and evening with them at a conference.

As my wife also got a really cool new job, this fall is looking very bright indeed.

Sometimes I get the feeling that a lot of people in programming suffer from some sort of developers Stockholm Syndrome. I mean, everybody whines about clueless management, we’re not allowed to do this and that, yadda-yadda whine-whine.

But then when presented with a option like Agile methodologies and XP which actually provides the power to decide about the things that should matter them as techies (because that is what XP is all about, you have the right to produce quality code given clear guidance under your own estimates and you go home by five etc), what happens? More whining.

It’s so comfy to blame clueless management for giving to little time, selecting a inferior platform and prioritize features over quality code. Many developers are simply not used to accepting full responsibility for their work. They’ve grown accustomed to the safetynet of blameability and need somebody else to take the responsibility if something should fail.

Kent Beck mentions courage as a essential factor for success. It is very true.

Det var ett tag sedan, en hel december har passerat. Julen tillbringades i tur och ordning i Stockholm (Julafton), Uppsala (Juldagen); Gr?velsj?n (Fram till ny?r) och sedan hemma i Beverly ?ngby igen.