Coding Is Like Cooking

I’ve just heard that two of my proposals for XP2010 have been accepted, which means I will definitely be off to Trondheim in early June. I’ve heard Trondheim is very beautiful, and the XP conference it usually excellent, so I’m really looking forward to it. It will actually be my 8th XP conference!

I’m going to be running a half day workshop “Test Driven Development: Performing Art”, which will be similar to the one I ran at XP2009, (which I blogged about here). I’ve put up a call for proposals on the codingdojo wiki, so do write to me if you’re interested in taking part.

The other thing I’ll be doing is a lightning talk “Making GUI testing productive and agile”. This will basically be a brief introduction to PyUseCase with a little demo. Hopefully it will raise interest in this kind of approach.

Perhaps I’ll see you there?

I just wrote a report about europython on my company blog.

Today at europython we listened to a keynote about Bletchley Park. This was the centre of British and allied codebreaking activities during the second world war, and where the first digital, programmable computer was built, Colossus. We heard about the current financial plight of the museum there, and the need for investment to renovate the huts that amongst others Alan Turing worked in. Dr Sue Black told us about her experiences trying to help lobby the government for more money for Bletchley park, using social networking, blogs and twitter. She recounted that she had recently met an elderly gentleman, one of the surviving codebreakers. She told us how close she felt to history when he related a story about when he was decoding a nazi message during the war, and his shock when he got to the end and discovered the message was signed “Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer”.

As a professional programmer, I think the site where the first digitally programmable computer was built has to be a place worth preserving. I hope that people will be able to visit there and see the reconstructed Colossus computer and be inspired by the stories of innovation and codebreaking that it enabled.

It was particuarly poignant for me to think about this when in the next session I checked my email and found a message from my mother saying that my grandmother died this morning. She was a living link to the history of the second world war for me. During the war she was a wireless operator, transmitting and receiving messages in morse code. And now she is not there any more. I am kind of in shock. But it just confirms for me that we need museums like the one at Bletchley Park to retain contact with our history.

(I wrote this post yesterday)

I’m at XP2009 this week, the sun is shining, the sea is blue and the italians are disorganized. I’m having a great time so far. This morning I was at a workshop led by Danilo Sato and Francisco Trindade – ‘The lego lean game’. The idea was that we should learn about lean principles by playing with lego. I thought it was good fun, and we did learn quite a bit about pull, kanban and continuous improvement. I hope I will be able to run this simulation for some of my colleagues, I think it is a good practical way of learning using all the senses, not just reading books or listening to presentations. Much more kinesthetic.

I usually follow the news in the agile world on infoq, and I like the feature whereby you can listen to selected conference presentations online. This week I was making some biscuits one evening, so I took the chance to listen to Linda Rising talking about “agility: possibilities at a personal level”. I have to say I was rather disappointed. I think her material was not that relevant to agile in the first place, many of her claims lacked credibility, and although the talk was superficially entertaining, it did not supply useful insights or conclusions. This provoked me into leaving a comment on the infoq site. I wonder if anyone will notice.