More wolf packs

Everything is organized. Helge Nowak and I will be running a Wolf Pack Programming workshop at XPDays in Hamburg. The workshop is on Thursday, November 25th and runs from 9:30am to 12:30pm.

Almost simultaneously—yes, we were double booked!—Jason Ayers and Michael Lucas-Smith will be running their own workshop at XPDays Benelux, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Theirs will get under way at 3:30pm.

Last week, Agical hosted a workshop in Stockholm as part of their monthly Geek Nights. Attendees included Scrum's Jeff Sutherland and, as usual, the event generated lots of interesting thoughts and discussion. A number of the participants did not have their own laptops and, as a result, most people were working in pairs at shared computers; we were amazed by the "heads down" behaviour and reduction in pack communication that this change seemed to cause. The enthusiastic response to the session netted several invitations to run further events in Scandinavia, so keep an eye out for more in the upcoming months.

This week's events

The VASt Forum in Stuttgart this week was well attended, with maybe 40 attendees. Unfortunately, as the presentations were all running long and I had to leave before the social event, there was quite limited time for discussion; but it was clear that most people were either past or existing Smalltalk users (though not necessarily current VASt customers). This, combined with the increasing regularity of Pharo sprints and the more than forty people who have already signed up for Camp Smalltalk London, seems to be a very good indication of the enthusiasm and growth in the Smalltalk community these days.

Attendance at the Irish Software Show in Dublin has been lower than we expected. My informal counts suggest about 60-80 people in attendance each day. Of interest to me was Wicket, which I had never looked at before; I was quite surprised to see how similar it is to Seaside in some respects and how similarly Andrew Lombardi, who was giving the presentation, described the framework's benefits and his joy when using it.

The web framework panel discussion had about 30 people watching and we had some good discussion there. Attendance at my Seaside talk was probably closer to 10. It would have been nice to have attracted more of the Java developers at the conference (there were about 20 people at the Wicket session earlier in the day) but it was interesting to find out that the majority of those who came had at least played with Smalltalk before.

Other interesting highlights include Kevin Noonan's talk on Clojure (seq's are much like Smalltalk's collection protocol but available on more classes), Matthew McCullough's presentation on Java debugging tools (interesting to see their progress and a also few ideas to look at ourselves), and Tim Berglund's overview of Gaelyk (reminds me disturbingly of writing PHP but the easy deployability and integration of XMPP, email, and Google Auth are cool). The speakers' dinner at the Odessa Club last night was great and we had a number of good discussions there as well.

The above photograph was humourously hung over the urinals in a restroom here in Dublin. I would have thought the slightly disturbing visual association was accidental if there hadn't been five separate copies!

Berlin, product management, and Smalltalk events

Beach bars, cuba libres, bircher müsli. I'd forgotten how classically German these things are but it only takes being away for a few months to make them stand out again.

Thanks to the official un-organizers of Product Camp Berlin, yesterday was a very successful day of discussions and networking. Some interesting points for me were:

• Kill a feature every day. That way people get used to the process and don't scream so loudly when support for features and platforms needs to be removed. This reminds me of the concepts of constant refactoring and non-ownership in software development, which helps ensure that people are similarly used to code going away.
• The problem may be your pricing model. When products (in startups particularly) begin to flounder, there may be nothing wrong with the product itself. Sometimes a simple tweak of the pricing model can be the most effective solution.
• The best way to unofficially kill a product is to publicly announce a "rewrite". Customers will avoid investing in the old system like the plague, rapidly starving the product of all its revenue.
• It sounds like there are some interesting products on the way from Nokia.
• This is my second conference since I actively started using twitter — it was not as well used this time but I still really like the technology for this sort of use case: it's great to see what you're missing, share your thoughts, and catch up with people after the event is over.
  

The weather was gorgeous in Berlin but has turned foul in southern Germany today. No big deal though as I've been slogging away indoors at my presentation for epicenter in Dublin on Thursday. I'm getting close with my slides and looking forward to the event but, before I can get that checked off my list, it's off to Stuttgart tomorrow evening for the VASt Forum.

[update: I've been offered 10 discount tickets for epicenter to give away; details here if you'd like to come see me in Dublin this week.]

For those wanting to attend the Camp Smalltalk London event on July 16-18, make sure you head over and sign up now. It's looking like we're going to fill up even our expanded capacity. If it's full by the time you get there, add yourself to the waiting list and we'll see what we can do.

Upcoming Smalltalk events

There are a number of Smalltalk events coming up in Europe over the next few months (Joachim posted about some of them a little while ago).

[edited to add:] I forgot to mention that I recorded another Industry Misinterpretations podcast with James Robertson and Michael Lucas Smith last week. It's a two-part episode talking about cross-platform Smalltalk development. The audio for the first part is available now; and (if I'm lucky) this link should be the second part once it is posted.

The UK Smalltalk User Group is up and running again and the next meeting will be at 6:30pm this Monday, April 26 at the Counting House.

[added] Markus Gälli pointed me to a talk by Claus Gittinger, creator of Smalltalk/X, on Flow-Based Programming. This will be in Zurich on April 28.

On May 4, Cincom is planning to host an experiment on "Wolfpack Programming" at the eXtreme Tuesday Club's weekly meeting. The idea is to play with how wolves' social structure and hunting strategies can be applied to a large team of programmers working in a single live system (kind of like extreme pair programming). It should be a fun evening and we're providing food and drinks for the night as thanks for your participation. More details will be posted on the May 4 meeting page shortly—please post your name there if you're coming.

May 16-19 is the SPA 2010 conference in London. This isn't a Smalltalk event, per se, but Cincom is sponsoring it and a few of us will there. We're hoping to have some results from the Wolfpack Programming experiment to discuss.

June 8 is the VA Smalltalk Forum Europe 2010 in Stuttgart. John O'Keefe from Instantiations will be presenting as well as Sebastian Heidbrink, Joachim Tuchel, and a number of others. Lukas Renggli will be talking about Seaside. I'm not presenting but I am planing to attend.

Also starting June 8 and running until the 11th is epicenter 2010: The Irish Software Show in Dublin. They asked me last fall to come talk about Seaside and I'm happy that we've got the details all worked out (though I'm still waiting for my bio to be updated). I'll be talking on Thursday the 10th and also, I think, taking part in a panel at one of the evening events.

On June 10, the 3rd Smalltalk Stammtisch in Köln (Cologne) is happening. Ich möchte gerne hingehen, aber das ist nicht möglich als ich nach Dublin fliegen muß.

July and August are quiet months in Europe since everyone goes on vacation. But I've heard rumours of a sprint or other event being discussed in London. I'll pass on anything I hear.

Then of course there's the annual ESUG 2010, in Barcelona this year from September 11 to 17. This has been one of my favourite events over the last few years.

Finally, we're also working on something in France (probably in June) and Sweden/Norway (Sep/Oct) but they're still preliminary, so I'll post details as they're available. Toss in some vacation and a couple of weddings this year and I'm going to be busy.

In the meantime, if I missed any events, please pass them along. Also, if you can think of conferences or events where Smalltalk should be represented or groups that would be interested in hearing about Seaside or Smalltalk in general, let me know and I'll see what I can do to make it happen.

Ceremonies and sun

What a beautiful day: the sun is out, the sky is blue, and the temperature is comfortably mild. I went for a run this afternoon and there was a crisp view of the city and the North Shore mountains. Over the next few days, viewers of the snowboarding events should catch a glimpse of the cityscape that pushed the mountain forward as a venue despite the risk of lackluster snow. Maëlle Ricker just secured Canada's second gold medal and, jogging my way along the neighbourhood's streets, I have never seen so many Canadian flags adorning cars, houses, and shop windows.

The big event seems to be running well. I've heard numerous complaints about this and that: what should have been done differently, where the lineups are too long, and so on. Events have been postponed and some tickets refunded but I guess that must be pretty common for the winter Olympics (the effects of weather are a major difference vs. the summer games). But from my perspective, the whole thing is a nightmarish logistical balancing act and the results have been acceptably smooth so far.

Just over an hour until the ceremonies

We watched the opening ceremonies on TV at the (relatively quiet) German Deutsches Haus downtown. I was initially disappointed. Like most, I cringed through the national anthem and the weird performance by Bryan Adams and Nelly Furtado, singing the same phrase over and over. Despite being well executed, the segment with the boy flying over the wheat fields was random and, frankly, long. And overall the show just didn't feel "big", particularly after the massive event put on in Beijing. The "hydraulic malfunction" at the end was disappointing and I was spared Wayne Gretzky's awkward slow-truck-ride to the second cauldron because German media cut away after the first one was lit.

But numerous people around me said they liked the Vancouver opening better than Beijing's, so I looked at it again. Watching highlights later in the evening, I started realizing how visually impressive some of the scenes were: the mountains, the trees, the streaking time-lapsed tail lights on the floor beneath the inline skaters. Canada's diversity—both cultural and geographic—was well represented. The use of the audience as a projection surface was an interesting touch and the blowing wales were surprising and effective. In the end, although I would have liked less cheesy "wire flying" and more variety in projection effects, I have to admit the performance was quite beautiful in a typically-Canadian understated kind of way.

After the ceremonies, we crossed the road to the German Fan Fest, where we were entertained by a lively cover band from Thüringen. The beer is pretty pricey at over $8 and the crowd was quite a bit younger than us but we had a good time. The German-style beer garden table layout, combined (I assume) with BC-style fire and liquor regulations, means the maximum occupancy is a tad low, so show up early if you don't want to wait in line.

The trip home after 1am was completely painless: there were night buses lining Howe St. and sometimes driving three abreast. Like I said: pretty smooth.

On Walking

Whenever I find myself in a new city, I like to walk. I find a map; I pick a direction, a neighbourhood, or an arbitrary destination; I put on comfortable shoes, and I walk somewhat aimlessly, just taking in what I find. Often I'll do this for days in a row, each time in a new direction. The endpoint and the route are irrelevant because it's about the journey itself.

There seems to be no better way to get a true sense of a city. You're really missing out if you think that Paris is all about the Eiffel Tower, that Beijing is characterized by the Forbidden City, or that you'll get a full understanding of New York by riding the subway and visiting Times Square. Oh sure, make time for those landmarks if you want, but what's really interesting is a city's people, its architecture, back alleys, corner stores, sidewalks, graffiti, parks, and used bookshops.

In Beijing I walked for weeks—hours every day—trying to puzzle out hànzì characters and discovering hidden temples, noodle shops, and bicycle repair stands. Day after day, I remember being constantly astounded by the sheer quantity of life that is lived every day in that vast city, by the amount of observable change from week to week.

Wandering in central Berlin one day, I stumbled across a brick line in the road, marking the former path of the Berlin Wall. I traced this line from Brandenburg Gate, through quiet residential areas, alongside concrete walls covered with vibrant murals, past memorials, and down renovated green spaces. As I picked my way east towards Warschauer Straße across the river, I felt a real sense of the history and the difference, still visible, between west and east.

In Kolkata (Calcutta), on possibly the only occasion when "the children" (we were 26) were allowed to roam the bustling downtown streets freely by ourselves, we stumbled across a serene old church with a graveyard full of interesting 250-year-old tombstones. There we hid from the beggars and hawkers and attempted to decipher the epitaphs engraved in old-fashioned English script.

The last two days, I wandered Frankfurt. Yesterday I took in the riverside, with its grassy banks, apparently covered with runners once the work day ends. I wandered downtown, enjoying the modern low-rise office buildings and German-style half-timbered houses, the quiet cobbled squares and the wide-open bustling shopping street. Frankfurt is perhaps not the most noteworthy of cities but it has a comfortable scale and pleasant feeling of balance.

Today, wanting to go farther afield, I caught an S-Bahn out of town, thinking I'd look for the Cincom office, which I knew to be in that direction. Only 20 minutes out of downtown, I got off the train in South Kronberg and discovered apple orchards, corn fields, vistas of church towers and rolling hills, and people riding horses right past the business park! In a field beside the passing cyclists and trail-walkers, a middle-aged man practiced paragliding. Wandering south through Niederhöchstadt, I then lucked upon an Apple Festival and made lunch out of apple wine and bratwurst before catching a return train.

Each city has a rhythm and you won't find it sitting in your car, your hotel room, or the ticket queue for the tourist sight of the day. So get out and walk.