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 almost forgot to mention it, but I have a new job. Again some might say.
After being a consultant for 1.5 years with Valtech Sweden, I am back in startup land. This time it is really, really startup. We registered our domain last friday, we do not have a web site yet, we are all sitting in one room on broken chairs. Ok, one broken chair. Mine is actually the good one.
It has only been three days, but boy, it is a lot of fun. The fact that you get to call all of the shots means that you can have things just the way you want them.
I look forward to this spring with a sense of excitement, that I will be part of building something that actually means something to me. That means a lot.
Once I got my hands on my new MacBook Pro, I did what mostly everybody else does - I bought a copy of Parallels Workstation for Mac. I need it mainly for running local servers so I can do demos of server environments etc.
For various reasons, we (Valtech) bought the license from the local retailer at the same time as the laptop. Big mistake. You see, if you buy Parallels from a local retailer in a non-english speaking country, you get a special, international, version. This version is not downloadable from the site, and has it’s own line of activation keys, so you cannot use the regular downloads from the site.
Now, that should not be a problem, should it? Well, it is. To make a long story short, I could not get the fine feature of NAT networking going. I did all the huffs and puffs of uninstalling, restarting etc, but to no avail. At the same time, the regular version worked swimmingly, apart from the fact that it would not accept my activation key.
So, I figured it was time to contact Parallels support. My idea was that due to the reasons above I could trade my malfunctioning international activation key for a working regular one. I mean, I had paid for their product and could prove it by sending the key I had.
Enter the Kafka world of Parallels customer support. I have to date sent them eight emails with an ever increasing level of anger. The first replies misunderstood my request, thought that I had lost my key and offered me tips on how to get that back. When I finally got my point across Parallels stopped replying. I had to send two more emails to get an answer. They now understood the nature of my request but there was nothing they could do about it. Instead I should take my product back to the local retailer for a refund, and then buy a new license from Parallels directly.
The local retailer Macoteket referred to the swedish importer who will not return calls or emails. And Parallels still won’t give me a new key.
The moral of the story is: if you are about to buy Parallels Workstation for Mac, make damn sure that you buy the standard version. The international one is crap, much like their customer support.
There should still be hope for VMWare on the Mac.
Update: Macoteket eventually refunded our purchase and I rebought the standard version. Too bad it took so much effort.
This is written on a spanking new MacBook Pro, the 2.33 GHz, 2GB version. Company issued, mind you. Now if that is not a good reason to work for Valtech, I do not know what is.
The main reason I upgraded from my trusty 1.67 GHz G4 PowerBook was not speed, it was the possibilities of Parallels. I do quite a bit of evaluating and demoing of server configurations, and having it all available locally is a complete killer.
The first virtual install was Buildix to convince a customer that Subversion and Trac is a viable platform.
But of course it is wroooom-fast. Extremely responsive, and not hot. I currently have it in my lap - no problems what so ever.
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.
Here in Sweden, Microsoft has an inexplicable stronghold, even in the server room. The last time Craig Larman, Valtechs Chief Scientist, was here he noted that nowhere did he see as large proportion of server side windows as in Sweden - and Denmark.
I don’t know what makes swedes pay for stuff others get for free. Perhaps the high taxes have made us used to money disappearing?
Mike Ratliff did a very good presentation on Fit/Fitnesse at Valtech Days. While praising the effects it can have on a development project, he also highlighted some of its quirks such as the ones I’ve complained about earlier.
The main point he made in my mind was when he said that Fit is not a testing tool but a requirements tool. It does not replace your regular acceptance testing tools. According to Mike, the main advantage Fitnesse brings is an increased, and executable, dialogue between customers and developers, and the possibility for customers to work with the spec in a “what if” manner.
I have been going over that thought for two days now and I think I really like it. And it makes me revalue Fitnesse, I definitely see the value of customers being able to work with the tests dynamically. I might just end up writing a blog post these days titled “Why I like Fit” :).
I’ll be traveling to Dallas, Texas this weekend to speak about agile documentation at Valtech Days.
I am looking forward to attending other sessions, the rest of the conference is looking really interesting. If you are in the area and want attend the conference, I believe there are still a few seats available.
As I’ve received a few requests for it, I’ve been given permission by my employer Valtech to republish an english version of my article on REST vs. SOAP here at my blog.
On behalf of my employer Valtech, I’ve written a piece on why I dislike SOAP, and favor REST. I originally wrote it in english, but the published version is in swedish.
For some REST preaching in hum-humpty-dum-dee-dum’ish go to
http://valtech.se/templates/JobSubPage.aspx?id=2582.
Update: As suggested by people more intelligent than myself, anchor tags really should have text inside them to be useful :).
While at Lecando, I was quite proud of the library of computer books we assembled oveer the years.
These days as a consultant for Valtech, my employer does indeed have a library, but as I am almost never at the office it is not really accessible.
I have therefore started to buy the books that I find necessary for my daily digital life out of my own pocket so that I can have access to them whenever I want. These are the ones I have got so far:
While looking at the list I couldn’t help but noticing that I really like the Pragmatic books. I am equally surprised that I have so far not felt the urgent need for any of the O’Reilly titles
Wow. I am back in Mac land, which I left in 1996 when I started my career at IBM and turned into a PC drone. Now, after four days of pure Mac joy, it feels like I am never going back.
This also goes to show what a cool company Valtech is. I mentioned this to Jon who got really jealous. Apparently the Thoughtworkers get company issued Dells and all Mac stuff is paid for by themselves.
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.
The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within by Stephen Fry
Managing the Design Factory by Donald G. Reinertsen
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson