The Trouble with Twitter

The thing about Twitter is it's so easy. Sitting down to write a blog post takes time and effort. I want to develop a thesis, establish a reasonable structure, and edit the thing until it flows and becomes a pleasure to read. Ignoring the time spent in advance thinking about the topic, a well-written non-trivial blog post might take me an hour to write (some have taken longer). As a result, I find it increasingly tempting to just dash off 140 characters and toss the result out to the masses.

The trouble is, if you have something to say and you want people to spend their time reading it, you really ought to take the time to craft a proper argument; it seems only fair. I would much rather read a handful of well-written, thought-provoking blog posts than a hundred trivial tweets. And besides, I actually enjoy the writing process.

I'm pretty confidant that some ideas are better suited for tweets and others for blog postss, but the line can be fuzzy. And the temptation of laziness persists so I'm going to need to increase the temptation of effort to counter it. In the meantime, I'll be on Twitter throwing out undeveloped thoughts with everyone else.

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.

Camp Smalltalk is popular

When the UK Smalltalk User Group started planning the Camp Smalltalk London event a few weeks ago, we imagined we might get 20 people. After only four days, 30 have signed up and we're jumping to figure out how many more people are interested and how many more we can handle. There are certainly worse problems to have!

If you're still interested in attending, please do us a favour and add yourself to the waiting list at cslondon2010.eventbrite.com.

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.

The penny drops

Steven shared a post arguing for the scrapping of the US dollar bill and one-cent coin. Canada scrapped the dollar bill ages ago but are still trucking along with the penny.

Of pennies, the author says "few rich countries have a coin so worthless", which I find a bit strange since all of Europe has a penny... I guess it's not technically "so worthless" since it's worth 1.5 US cents, but in relative terms it amounts to more or less the same thing. They also have a 2c coin, which is curious in the eyes of a North American.

Australia, though, got rid of its penny a while back and now rounds all prices to the nearest 5 cents. As a result, I recall seeing a guy with a Ferrari right smack in the middle of the Nullarbor, hundreds of kilometers from the next gas station, making sure to get the "perfect" pump that would give him his two cents of "free" rounded-off gasoline.

Interestingly, Europe (including the UK) and Australia both have 5,10,20,50 cent (or pence) coins instead of the 5,10,25 cent coins used in North America. When giving change, the North American system requires more coins in almost every case. Having a 2c coin gives Europe another edge here and dropping the one- and two-cent coins put Australia firmly in the lead for fewest coins required on average.

Of course the sub-five-cent coins are rarely used in Europe anyway because sales tax is already included in the prices. This means your €3.95 sandwich will get you 5 cents (one coin) in change while your $3.99+7% tax sandwich will put 73 cents (7 coins) in your pocket. Simply moving to include the tax in prices would significantly reduce demand for the US penny.

From the things-I-did-on-Saturday dept...

Saturday I continued what seems to have become a personal weekend tradition of running along the banks of the Thames. I've been trying to run different parts each week and I may actually make it a goal to work my way along the river, though I'm not sure what to pick as start and end points (maybe the edges of Zone 6 would be a good start).

This weekend I ran from Putney Bridge upstream to Kew Bridge, a little farther than the finish line for the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, which it turns out starts in Putney and was also being held that afternoon. This 6.8km race started in 1829 and has been held annually on the Thames tideway since 1856. People here take this event seriously, apparently, with 250,000 people arriving to watch it live from the riverbanks and nearly 8 million people watching it on television.

London graced us with pretty nice weather for the day and people were out enjoying BBQs and beer. I had to enjoy by watching since I don't normally run with a wallet, but I did make it back to Putney on the tube in time to catch the start of the race. And that's about all you can catch because those guys move fast and are out of sight pretty quickly. In the end, Cambridge held strong on the outside of a long bend in the river and managed to score a narrow come-from-behind victory near the end.

I also popped into town to catch the final evening of Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. I was curious to see this production—with Sir Ian McKellen opposite Sir Patrick Stewart—last summer, and was delighted to find it had been remounted, albeit with Stewart replaced by Roger Rees. I found the scenes between Vladimir and Estragon quite engaging (McKellen is marvelous and the pair have excellent comic timing) but the scenes with Pozzo just seemed to drag. I've seen the play once before but can't recall the event well enough to know whether this is a script problem or one unique to this production. Apparently they're taking the show on a world tour; if you can handle this 1940's take on a "show about nothing", I'd recommend it, even just for a chance to catch Ian McKellen in a more intimate setting than the supposedly-upcoming Hobbit movies.