A space to think, 2.0

Proud of our Scala team's successful launch of WebTrader

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:26:37 -0500

“So, team, we’ve got a new exciting product to build called WebTrader and it’s going to have to deal with potentially spiky and massive traffic, and we want to build it in Scala and Lift, oh and run it on Cloud Foundry…”

Yep, that’s the sort of challenge OpenCredo thrives on and this week we successfully launched our third product using this stack of technologies and we’re very proud to be able to say it’s been a great journey.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting on the team blog and through our partners some of the experiences we’ve had building and delivering these applications into production. Everything from hourly turnaround pushes to production to the intricacies of building and testing production-strength Scala with Lift.

Watch this space!

GOTO:Copenhagen ... no, seriously, next time GO. TO. Copenhagen.

Sun, 15 May 2011 11:41:04 -0400

I’ve just returned (and my liver is recovering) from 3 days this week at the GOTO:Copenhagen conference. Those of you who have followed me on twitter will have had a virtual barrage of tweets from me to contend with, which normally I would apologise for but in this case all I can say is that in my opinion the experience thoroughly justified my tweet-diarrhea. Besides, if I’m boring anyone they can always ignore me!

I don’t often write up my thoughts from conferences. I find that the back-patting nature of these things, especially from a speaker, can get a bit self-congratulatory and tiresome. However this conference was such a wonderful and compelling experience for me that sharing some of the highlights is just not something I feel I have a choice about.

For the impatient, in a nutshell this conference was an absolute gem!

Irreverence, humor, honesty and Iconoclasm

To try to convey all of the experiences that I had at this conference would be an impossible task. If anyone sees me out and about and fancies buying me a beer (mine’s a Carlsberg Classic if we can find it) then I’ll probably recall, through the wonder of associated memory, a lot more of the details that I’ll forget to mention here.

From meeting the inspiring fire-brand John Nolan; the friendly, funny but oh-so-direct rational thinking of Brian Foote; the pragmatic and valuable story-telling of Dan North and Chris Read; the engaging and interactive (not to mention chocolate depositing) Sarah Taraporewalla; the thoughtful and incisive reasoning on architecture from Simon Brown; and, last but never least, the awesome intellect of Dave Thomas; this was three days of wonderfully irreverent and honest dialogue amongst the smartest minds that I’ve ever encountered, and that’s including the attendees!

The entire conference was chock full of these sorts of highlights brought to life through each of the talks. However the standout highlight of this conference for me wasn’t a talk, it was in fact a whole track! Sadly missing its inspirational track host in Steve Freeman the Iconoclasts track was, I have no other words, just freakishly wonderful! All the speakers on the track just upped the honestly and fun levels through the roof, which on its own would have been enough but to couple that with strong, well-thought-out and valuable messages as well!? It truly was a joy to behold.

My place in this heady mix

I was proud and slightly daunted at speaking after wonderfully engaging talks from Sarah Tarraporewalla and Dan North. Then to find I was to be followed by the genius of Dave Thomas, that raised the nerves just that little higher I can tell you. There is nothing that is more nerve-wracking and essentially rewarding than speaking in front of those you consider your peers, mentors, and friends. They’re the ones who know your faults and gaps in knowledge, but to have such great feedback after delivering my “Why don’t we learn!?” talk made soldiering through the daunting experience that much more worth it.

That feedback and having given a talk on the same stage that Jimi Hendrix played… well, in the next talk in this series I intend to present in detail a lot more concrete steps and experiences that drive continuous learning within the software development process, and now I can’t wait to have that talk ready to deliver!

Sadly, it had to come to an end

I was very sad to have to leave the conference early on Friday to make my flight back to the UK. There was a wonderfully egalitarian feel and solidarity to this conference, with many of the talks (including mine) trying to break the restrictive dogmatism that is plaguing software development (currently agilism?). Thinking, learning, Socratic method and People featured as heavily as I could ever hope they would.

The wonderful talks and resulting dialogue with attendees and the speakers (once again, this mix being wonderfully orchestrated by Geeta, Liv, and all the wonderful folks from Trifork!) rendered the need for me to be back to London on Friday absolutely tragic.

I don’t have many regrets from this conference, but if I had to choose two it would be a) missing the Eigenharp demo from John Nolan and b) wishing I could have the pleasure of meeting up with these smart and irreverent people (attendees and speakers) much more often. There’s something essentially therapeutic, and optimistic even in the face of painful reality, to hang around people who are truly dedicated to making things better at the sacrifice of any and all false idols.

In a nutshell, a truly refreshing, thought-provoking and dialogue-creating conference. You can’t ask for much more than that!

Roll on the next one!

Jussi of OpenCredo makes Neo4J AWS AMI available

Mon, 09 May 2011 13:44:00 -0400

I’m very pleased to announce that Jussi Heinonen (our in-house Agile Ops Practice Lead) has created a simple-to-get-running Amazon Web Services instance loaded with Neo4J.

Anyone can now grab and use this AMI for free (as in beer), following the instructions on Jussi’s blog.

P.S. If you’re at GOTO:Copenhagen this week then it’s well worth catching the Neo4J workshop tomorrow (Tuesday) with Jim Webber, as well as my talk on Thursday if you’d like to say hi!

My talk from QCon London 2011, "Why Don’t We Learn!?", now available

Fri, 06 May 2011 06:56:00 -0400

My talk from QCon London 2011, "Why Don’t We Learn!?", now available:

The kind folks at InfoQ have just published by talk from QCon London 2011.

I was particularly nervous and proud of this talk as it’s all about how I (and my team at OpenCredo) pragmatically apply tools, techniques and processes to concretely through experiments and evidence improve the software development and delivery systems of our clients.

I hope you enjoy watching the talk as much as I did giving it!

Dan and Chris talk Agility in Operations

Sun, 01 May 2011 08:09:07 -0400

Dan and Chris talk Agility in Operations

A few days ago the family and I spent a few really beautiful...

Sun, 01 May 2011 08:00:19 -0400

The bluebells in full bloom

Mali playing hide and seek

A simple beutiful sight

A few days ago the family and I spent a few really beautiful (and fun) hours on the Bluebell Walk near where I live in Lewes.

A lovely time was had by everyone, especially my brother, Rich, and my daughter Mali who enjoyed a good game of hide and seek!

laughingsquid: The Space Shuttle Is Waiting A beautiful sight!...

Sun, 01 May 2011 07:49:38 -0400

laughingsquid:

The Space Shuttle Is Waiting

A beautiful sight! Wish I’d managed to be in the neighborhood just once to see a shuttle take off, no chance now I’m afraid!

Interviewing Craig Larman on Large Scale Agility @ QCon London

Sun, 01 May 2011 07:48:00 -0400

Interviewing Craig Larman on Large Scale Agility @ QCon London:

I recently had the real pleasure of interviewing Craig Larman at QCon London, 2011. Craig was much in demand at the conference, delivering both the first day’s keynote and speaking on my Enterprise Agile Transformation track.

Huge thanks to Craig for making the time for this fascinating interview.

Drusillas today was great! Although my daughter, Mali, was...

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 13:41:41 -0400

Drusillas today was great! Although my daughter, Mali, was mostly only interested in the paddling pool and Thomas the train!

So what happened to "Learning UML 2.0" the site!?

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 13:39:03 -0400

The truth is, it got lost in the noise. No excuse really, and now I’m going to try and put that right.

It’s time to rectify that. So, if you’re looking for support materials and bits and pieces around “Learning UML 2.0”, “Head First Software Development”, or even my golden oldie “AspectJ Cookbook”, here is the place to ask.

Please forgive a rapidly aging author for misplacing the original sites for his books :-)

Amazon.com: Programming Spring (9781449302474): Russ Miles, Tareq Abedrabbo: Books

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 13:34:28 -0400

Amazon.com: Programming Spring (9781449302474): Russ Miles, Tareq Abedrabbo: Books:

Time to get writing… Book No. 4 will be on its way soon. ‘Spring 3 Hacking’ was apparently too subversive, so ‘Programming Spring’ it will be!

A flower from our garden here in Lewes. I love summer! (Ok,...

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 13:26:31 -0400

A flower from our garden here in Lewes. I love summer! (Ok, it’s really only Spring, but the weather can’t lie, can it…?)

Cloud Foundry Open PaaS Deep Dive | Cloud Foundry

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 12:34:45 -0400

Cloud Foundry Open PaaS Deep Dive | Cloud Foundry:

What I’ll be doing this ‘week off’…

A huge thanks to the CloudFoundry folks for coming up with such a compelling PaaS. I’ve got a week of sun, possibly sea and probably coding this week, and delving under the covers of CloudFoundry seems like an excellent use of my time.

More about what I discover coming here soon.

It was time...

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 12:31:13 -0400

… to start a new blog.

I’ve been looking for some time for a new blogging platform, something I could use simply and that would help me focus on on things a bit more. Not that my old platform was particularly noisy, I just wasn’t ‘feeling the love’ for blogging like I used to.

Introducing my first test, using Tumblr. Why Tumblr? Because the good folks over at CloudFoundry are using it for their blog and I thought, why not!?

So what happens next? I guess that’s up to me. Expect more posts and bits and pieces here as I finally open up to the world a bit (not too much though! don’t worry).

Cheers,
Russ