Coding Is Like Cooking

What do you have to do to get me to come and work for your company? Well, it seems a couple of free lunches and some good geeky conversation works pretty well. Of course, it helps if you’re also offering me an exciting mix of software development work, high calibre colleagues and speaking engagements, all on my doorstep here in Gothenburg. So anyway, yesterday I signed on the dotted line for IBS JavaSolutions AB.

JavaSolutions is responsible for the local branch of Sun’s JavaForum, which exists to support Java developers. There are regular meetings with talks and mingle, a bit like GothPy only on Java and without the interactive coding part. Hmm. I might have to do something about that 🙂 JavaSolutions also has a blog that employees are expected to contribute to. So I will have to devise some strategy for what to blog here and what to blog there.

My first appearance in my new role will be at agile2008 in Toronto, Canada, at the beginning of August. I’ll be leading a session about Automated Acceptance Testing with my husband, Geoff. During the rest of the conference I will probably be going to lots of stuff to do with agile development and testing in Java. Having spent the last 6 years working in python, I’ll need to brush up my Java a little.

So I’m looking forward to a fun autumn coding, learning stuff, and getting involved with GothPy and JavaForum. For the moment though, I plan to make the most of the Swedish summer together with two small children.

Last night a group of eight python hackers were drawn into a darkened conference room on Odinsgatan “Odin’s street” in order to exchange little-known information and to take part in obscure coding rituals. To open proceedings, Andrew Dalke shared deep insights into the enigmatic “stackless” python. Later on, fuelled by strong Swedish coffee and cucumber sandwiches, we together attempted the “BankOCR” Code Kata. Everyone present contributed to further our art, and most took a turn working the somewhat arcane keyboard and IDE. By the end we had created a perfect although incomplete code chimera. Despite our considerable successes, it may need further work before any bank would consider taking on our design for their optical character recognition system.

And now I must confess to the part I have played in this pythonic plot. It is the result of scheming between Andrew Dalke, Johan Lindberg and myself. We joined together a few weeks ago to make arrangements for the creation of this chapter of the python community. By some twist of fate, I was designated “temporär ordförande”, or “acting high priest”.

Three hours of pythonic union notwithstanding, everyone present last night agreed that the experiment should be repeated. We look forward to the continuation of our assembly at the second Gothenburg Python User Group meeting sometime next month.