Off to the races

This week I made my first ever trip to a race track. "The Races" are a perfect opportunity for the class-based British society to strut its stuff, with innumerable options for different seating areas and "enclosures", each slightly more prestigious than the next. A number of people seemed to have paid extra for the ability to watch the races from the center section in the middle of the course; I can't see that the seating was any better but they did get to be seen by everyone else walking across the track before each race. Somebody even arrived by helicopter, parking their aircraft (and leaving it all night—you can see it in the photo above) in the middle of the course!
It was fun though with everyone in their posh summer dresses, running back and forth from the track to the tables to the betting windows. And we even managed to win enough to just about cover admission, food, and drinks. Not bad for an evening's entertainment.

Among other things I learned that the odds on the favourites shorten closer to the race as more people bet on them. So if you're betting on a favourite, you should do so early and with one of the betting houses near the track, which pay out based on the odds printed on your ticket. Conversely, if you're not betting on a favourite, you should place your bet at the last minute or with the betting windows, which pay out odds based on the final total of bets placed (they make a risk-free killing from a straight mathematical percentage off the top). Also, the "three-way" bets, which cost double but pay out 125% for a win and 25% for a 2nd- or 3rd-place finish, seem like a good idea for decently-ranked (but non-favourite) horses with odds between, say, 5-1 and 7-1.
So of course, now that I have a fool-proof guaranteed system, we're going to have to head back more often to capitalize on it. Or... maybe I should quite while I'm ahead.

Seaside 3 "Release Candidate"

You could say it's been a long time coming.

Seaside 3.0 began ambitiously and grew from there. We began (at least I did) with the goal of cleaning up the architecture, revisiting each aspect and asking what could be simplified, clarified, or standardized. As functional layers were teased apart, suddenly pieces became unloadable and a repackaging effort got under way. From this we realized we could make the process of porting Seaside much less painful. Along the way, we lowered response times and reduced memory usage, added 10x the number of unit tests (1467 at last count), standardized code and improved code documentation, added jQuery support, and, oh, did you hear there's a book?

The result? This release runs leaner, on at least six Smalltalk platforms and is, I think, easier to learn, easier to use, and easier to extend. Seaside 3.0 is the best platform out there for developing complex, server-side web applications. Is it perfect? No, but I'll come to that part in a moment. It is the result of literally thousands of hours of work by a small group of people across all six platforms. But this release also exists only due to the generosity of Seaside users who tried it, filed bugs against it, submitted patches for it, and eventually deployed it.

Deployed it?! Yeah, you see, not only have all the commercial vendors chosen to ship our alphas and betas, but our users have also used them to put national-scale commercial projects into production. I alluded last month to a conference session I attended, in which somebody made the statement that

The best way to kill a product is to publicly announce a rewrite. Customers will immediately avoid investing in the "old" system like the plague, starving the product of all its revenue and eventually killing it.

It was a shocking moment as I realized we'd attempted just that. At first we justified the long release cycle because we were "doing a major rewrite"; then we just had "a lot more work to do". Eventually there were "just too many bugs" and things "just weren't stable enough". And, finally, once we realized we desperately needed to release and move forward, we just ran out of steam (no quotes there—we really did).

I still think the original architectural work needed doing and I'm really happy about where we ended up, but here's what I've learned:

• When your wonderful, dedicated users start putting your code into production, they're telling you it's ready to be released. Listen to them.
• We don't have the manpower to carry out the kind of QA process that goes along with an Development, Alpha, Beta, RC, Final release process.
• We need to figure out how to get more users actively involved in the project. This could be by writing code but probably more importantly by writing documentation, improving usability, building releases, managing the website, doing graphical design, or something else entirely. The small core team simply can't handle it all.
  

Trying to apply these lessons over the past month, I asked for help from a few people (thank you!) and we closed some final bugs, ran through the functional tests, developed a brand new welcome screen, and managed to bundle everything up. We're releasing this today as 3.0RC.

We're not planning a standard multi-RC process. The "Release Candidate" simply signifies that you all have one last chance to download it, try it , and let us know about any major explosions before we do a final release, hopefully at the end of the month. From there we'll be reverting to a simpler process, using frequent point releases to fix bugs. 3.1 will have a smaller, better defined scope and a shorter cycle. I have some ideas but before we start thinking about that, we all need a breather.

I also have some ideas about the challenges that potential contributors to the project may face. But I'd like to hear your thoughts and experiences. So, if you have any suggestions or you'd like to help but something is stopping you, send me an email or (better yet if you're there) pull me aside at Camp Smalltalk London or ESUG and tell me about it.

Ok, ok. You've waited long enough—thank you. Here's the 3.0RC one-click image, based on Pharo 1.1 RC3 and Grease 1.0RC (just the image here). Dale has promised an updated Metacello definition soon. Enjoy!

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.