Impressions of Stockholm

After just over a day in Stockholm, the city seems wonderful. The architecture reminds me somehow of Vienna, while the surrounding water has a distinctly Venetian quality: dividing and yet simultaneously tying the place together. The sun has been shining and the crisp air, cold enough to require bundling up, has me thinking of Christmas and longing for a mug of mulled wine and an open fire.

Aside from a lot of walking, I've had a couple of other highlights. The first was a delicious meal last night at Bakfickan ("The Hip Pocket"), the low-end of a set of restaurants in The Royal Opera House. The prices aren't exactly low-end but, having grown accustomed to London prices, I didn't find them too shocking. I chose Swedish meatballs in a flavourful cream sauce, served with some of the best mashed potatoes I've ever eaten, sweet lingonberries, and deliciously refreshing pickled cucumber. I washed it all down with a bottle of Landsort Lager, which turned out to be surprisingly tasty as well. The chocolate mousse, ordered in a flurry of food excitement, didn't quite manage to live up to the rest: despite a lovely delicate flavour, the mixed-in crunchy chocolate bits made for a strange texture and the mousse itself was a bit heavy. Still, with great atmosphere—including a conversation about Opera with the friendly Swedish gentleman at the bar stool next to me—and friendly service, I consider it £30 well spent.

My other recommendation is the Vasa Museum, just over the bridge onto Djurgården. This well-thought-out museum was built over top of an old navy dry dock and houses the imposing wreck of the Vasa, a 37-meter warship, which foundered and sunk on her maiden voyage in 1628. She was raised, almost fully intact, in 1961 and restored. The museum is well laid out, with a wide range of interesting exhibits about the ship, her sinking and restoration, and life onboard a ship and in Sweden in the 17th century. The museum is particularly commendable for having avoided the trap of adding flaps and drawers to make the exhibits "more interactive", opting instead to use good presentation and just the right level of detail to make them engaging. A hands-on computer exhibit on the top floor does an excellent job of explaining the forces involved in the stability (or instability!) of a floating ship.

Tomorrow I turn my attention back to work for a few days before heading on to Oslo.

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.

My new job

I'm happy to announce that I have accepted a full-time position with Cincom in the UK. As a result, I will be laying down my consulting hat for a while, and heading to London at the end of the month. I'll be doing Pre-Sales Consulting (or Sales Engineering, as some call it) for their Smalltalk products in Europe and also working on another product in development. I'm really looking forward to focusing my energy on customers and product/business challenges for a while... it should be interesting.

I still intend to keep active with Seaside, though my role and availability may shift somewhat. With an active user base providing amazing support on the mailing list these days and a 3.0 beta release just around the corner, this is pretty good timing. Once we get the beta out there, we'll need to start discussing what comes next but first things first... and more on that in the next little while.

In the meantime, I encourage those of you in and around London to keep in touch - I'm going to need to find out where the good watering holes are. :)

Happy Australia Day!

Sure it seems like January 25th to the rest of us, but in that upside-down land across the Pacific, it's already the 26th, the anniversary of the First Fleet's arrival in Sydney Cove in 1788. And that means barbecues, more beer than usual, and "back yard cricket" (don't ask—I never even got the rules of normal cricket).
While in Australia, I developed a soft spot for their national holiday and their stereotypically easy-going form of celebration (also for the Southern Cross, but that's another story). On top of that, several close friends have recently moved down under, so in honour of their first Australia Day, I thought I'd post a couple of "iconic" images from my collection (click the image above).
To all of you in Australia or with a bit of it in you, Happy Australia Day!

Boston Roundup

First off, just to get this out of the way, Hyatt Regency Boston: nice enough hotel but 50c/min for internet? They do realize that works out to $30/hr right?! I mean... heck, I'm speechless. And I can't decide which is worse, that or the $36/day for parking. Luckily I didn't have a car.

From Boston '09 (Steven Noble)

I was in Boston a few weeks ago to take Product Management training (happy to report I passed the certification!). An old friend of mine came down from Ontario and we took in the town for the weekend. We spent much of Saturday wandering around Cambridge and then walked the Freedom Trail back through the North End, Boston's fabulous Little Italy.

The financial district had a nice sense of scale, not unlike downtown Vancouver (if you ignore the West End) or maybe... Perth? And Boston Commons is a perfect feature in the heart of downtown; it's nowhere near the size of, say, Central Park or Stanley Park but is one of the nicest city parks I've seen.

Overall, I liked the feel of Boston, and the snow and drizzle failed to dampen our spirits. I have to confess that I found Cambridge pretty uninspiring, though. I expected Harvard and MIT to exude a sense of history and achievement—like the colleges in Cambridge, England or even Trinity College in downtown Dublin—but they felt like little more than a collection of oldish buildings. Maybe the preponderance of brick as a building material simply fails to impress.

On Sunday night, I went for dinner with Carl Gundel and Chris Norton, two Boston-area one-time Squeakers. As in Vienna, I presented a convenient excuse for Smalltalkers who hadn't crossed paths in years to get together. We had some interesting discussions and hopefully reignited the Smalltalk spark in Chris.
Kudos to Yelp for the recommendation of Bar Lola and to Zagat for the pointer to delicious Italian food and friendly service at Carmen. Oh, and I loved the Equal Exchange Cafe — wish it was in Vancouver.
As usual, click any of the photos above to see the others I posted. Or check out Steven's photos from the trip.

Training in Boston

So I'm most of the way through this jaunt down the US East Coast and have yet to post even a single update (unless you count the occasional tweet). I know, I know... what can I say? I've been busy. My first attempt was overly rambling so I'm going to focus on one aspect here and follow up with a few more posts over the next couple of weeks.

The main reason for the trip was a Product Management seminar led by Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing—and I definitely recommend the course to anyone who's interested in this stuff. One thing I found interesting: in North America smalltalk usually means asking, "so what do you do?"; well at a seminar made up of 30 people who all do the same thing, that gets replaced with, "so where do you work?". Fun watching the puzzled looks on people's faces as they stared at the blank line below the name on this independent consultant's name tag. :)

The main focus of the course is on guiding product development through market problems and on grounding those problems in real data instead of hunches and "wouldn't it be cool if...?". I'm interested in Product Management from two angles: first, as a possible career direction and, second, in its applicability to open source projects, such as Seaside.

In past jobs, I've found myself naturally trying to fill an institutional void. I've been the one asking, "Are you sure the students want an on-campus version of Facebook? I kind of suspect they just want to use Facebook...". Actual demand for what we were doing, the exact problems we were trying to solve, and even the development costs have all been more-or-less-hand-wavy things. How do you know what to implement if you don't know what problem you're solving and for whom? Or, to look at it another way, if you develop without that knowledge, how do you know anyone will find the result valuable? It was revealing for me when I first learned there are people who make a living doing these things I found rewarding.

The applicability to open source is an interesting issue. On the one hand, it is almost intuitively obvious that most of the same factors apply. A project that meets a market need will succeed while one that does not will fail. A project that knows who its users are can be more effectively marketed; one that does not will succeed only through chance or an inefficient shotgun approach. What I'm not sure of yet is what is different: is it the formulas, the costs of the resources, or maybe their units of measurement? Or do we need to tweak one or more of the definitions? As a random example, Product Management makes a distinction between users and buyers of a product; what's the correct mapping for these concepts in open source? I'm still pondering all this... more to come.

Before I leave off, I should mention that the Hilton DoubleTree in Bedford is one of my best hotel experiences in recent memory. Everything was efficient and painless. The room was roomy, modern, and spotlessly clean. The internet was fast and free. And the (three!) extra pillows I tossed on the floor were left there neatly for my entire stay instead of being put back on the bed. They even insisted on comping a meal I had in the restaurant which was, admittedly, slow in arriving but not to the point I was concerned about it. So, I don't know why you'd be in suburban Boston, but if you are, go stay at the DoubleTree.

Boston, NY, Raleigh

I've confirmed a December trip to the US East Coast. In Boston, I'm attending a product management seminar put on by Pragmatic Marketing, meeting up with a few Smalltalkers from the area, and planning to pop in on the Boston Ruby group's monthly meeting if I can squeeze it in.

On Thursday, December 10, it looks like I'll be giving a presentation at the NYC Smalltalk users group—Charles was kind enough to try to schedule something around my timetable. Details are not quite confirmed; I'll try to remember to post an update here but keep an eye on their site if you're interested. I'm planning to talk a bit about the techniques and tools we use to ensure Seaside portability across the various Smalltalk dialects but we'll see where the conversation wanders. I'm also planning to visit with friends, enjoy the pre-Christmas season in New York, and maybe do some shopping.

Finally, I'm making my way down to visit the VA Smalltalk team in Raleigh, North Carolina. John and I are planning to put our heads together on a couple of issues and I think I'll be doing a Seaside tutorial for some of the engineers while I'm there.

I'm looking forward to a productive, if exhausting, trip. Drop me a line if you're in one of these areas and want to meet up.

Vienna or bust

I've been wanting to visit Vienna at least since my arrival in Germany last year —particularly after trying to learn the Viennese Waltz in my ballroom dancing class—but could never convince anyone to come along. Thanks largely to an invitation from Bernhard Pieber, I finally made the trip.
And I've been busy: as well as trying to take in Viennese culture and some of the sights, I also presented an introduction to Seaside at mobilkom austria and had the chance to meet some local Smalltalk and Seaside developers over dinner and beer. It seems to take the arrival of a foreigner to prompt the locals to get together (no surprise: the same is true in my home town!).
Vienna is much as I imagined: a real "European" city with beautiful old architecture everywhere you look. A visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum would have been worth it just to see the building itself, but I was also struck by a couple of sculptures and by several paintings by Pieter Bruegel and Lucas I. van Valckenborch. It's interesting that I liked both artists since it turns out that van Valckenborch studied under Bruegel and Bruegel's Tower of Babel, which was displayed in the museum, was the model for van Valckenborch's version, which hangs in the Louvre.

First thing one morning, I walked to the Spanish Riding School to watch the exercises of the Lipizzaner Stallions. I thought Lipizzans were all grays but apparently that is simply the dominant and selected gene and it is tradition to keep at least one bay at the school at all times. The horses and their riders are impressively controlled and the Winter Riding School itself is astounding too: is there anywhere else in the world where you can ride a horse on a bed of sawdust, surrounded by two levels of marble balconies and lit by enormous chandeliers?

We saw a big band concert at a local jazz club and got standing-room tickets to a sold-out orchestral performance with Lang Lang (郎朗) on the piano and Zubin Mehta conducting. I would have gladly paid the extra for a seat if one was available, but these €6 standing tickets are a wonderful idea to make the symphony more accessible. The only disappointment was the sound in the concert hall, which seemed somewhat flat, probably due to our location under the balcony.

Schloss Schönbrunn (the former imperial palace) is also worth a visit. The expansive gardens are enjoyed in the mornings by walkers and runners and, despite the tourist hoards, the Gloriette perched on its hilltop behind the palace, creates a striking image. The palace museum was interesting too: among other things, I discovered that Marie Antoinette was Austrian (she, like most of her 10 sisters, were married to foreign royalty for political reasons).

Like I said, I've been busy.

In Bruges

I spent this weekend in Belgium. Arriving in Bruges after dark, I was greeted by the clip-clop of horse-drawn carts on cobbled streets (what an amazing sound!) and narrow lanes lined with medieval stone and brick buildings. The whole scene is gently lit by street lights that manage to avoid casting the gloomy sodium-light shadows found most places. Bruges by night is one of the most beautiful and romantic cities I have seen.
Incidentally, apparently I'm one of the few people left in the world who hasn't seen the movie In Bruges (oh it's recent... no wonder I didn't see it: I was in China), since it's all anybody talks about whenever Bruges comes up in conversation.
I had already decided to go for a run on Saturday when I looked at the online event listings and found there was an organized run happening and not much else that interested me. So, after a pleasant boat tour around the canals, I took my advice from last week one level further and saw the area around Bruges while running a 15km race.
For dinner, I found an excellent restaurant called De Vlaamsche Pot (The Flemish Pot), which serves local regional cuisine. The two-storey restaurant is cleverly laid out throughout a restored period house, complete with huge wooden beams in the ceilings. It is charmingly decorated and it successfully creates the atmosphere of somebody's dining room without any of the rooms feeling cramped at all. On top of that, the service was excellent in any language you can think of and the food was terrific. I filled up on delicious Flemish beef stew and didn't have room to even consider dessert.
The city's charm is tempered slightly during the day by the hoards of ambling tourists but not enough to put a damper on the weekend. It would be nice to do some day trips in the area some day: I'd love to see the fields of poppies and maybe check out Ypres and its Menin Gate, a painting of which struck me while in Canberra a number of years ago. It's always good to save something for the next visit.
Belgium brings my number of visited countries for the past three weeks to six and it looks like I'll hit at least seven before making it back to Canada... whew.

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.

London

I'll be in London (UK) on Wednesday June 24 for 10 days or so. If anyone around there wants to meet up for a beer and talk Seaside, Smalltalk, or something else, send me an email or add a comment. Or if there are any good tech meetups during that time I'd be happy for a pointer.

Inspiring Service

My recent vacation to Portugal demonstrated the universally welcoming and easy going nature of its citizens. The weather was warm, the wind was fresh, the scenery was green and dotted with Spring blooms. The beaches were long and (because it was not yet Summer) uncrowded.

Still, the trip stands out most in my mind not for any of the above reasons but because it was essentially unmarred by lousy service. Depressingly, this seems so novel that I feel compelled to comment on the highlights.

Our flights on EasyJet proved far less stressful than on any other discount airline I have used. Sure, you're still paying for food and drinks and it isn't exactly luxury travel but the only weight restriction on hand luggage is that you be able to comfortably lift it overhead. And while you pay extra for every checked bag, they can weigh up to 32kg. Talk about removing stress from your travel planning. The food was at least fairly reasonably priced, the advertising audio pollution seemed less constant than on RyanAir, and the airplanes didn't look like they were decorated by Fisher Price. Despite being a discount airline, EasyJet seems to take some pride in providing a positive experience for its customers. Now if only they would eliminate the disturbingly animalistic charge for the door by assigning seats on check-in...

For the third time, we again booked our rental car with holidayautos.de. They partner with rental companies in each city to provide all-inclusive rentals: collision damage waiver, no deductible, third party liability, unlimited mileage, a second driver, etc. The only additional thing you pay is fuel and the prices are reasonable; to remove the 3000€ deductible, the couple in front of us were quoted nearly as much as we paid for the entire rental.

There are no more "Would you like to add X for only $Y?" questions and this completely takes the stress out of dealing with the rental companies on arrival. On a previous trip, we were charged some additional fee by the rental company but, upon return, HolidayAutos refunded the money to my credit card within a day or two of sending the receipt. And (!) they answer the call quickly when you phone. Note that the last time I checked the prices on the US (.com) version of the site didn't seem nearly as compelling.

One final example is Restaurante Oriente in Lisbon. This place was recommended in the EasyJet inflight magazine of all places and offered an excellent vegetarian buffet. The service was exceedingly friendly and, when the already-half-empty beer bottle we were pouring foamed over the top of the glass, it was replaced with a new bottle before the spill was even mopped up. This was way beyond necessary and (particularly since we were tourists and obviously unlikely return customers) totally unexpected.

Thanks and congratulations to these companies for providing excellent service and value to their customers.