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.

New York presentation confirmed

The details for my talk in New York have been confirmed. We'll be at the Suite LLC offices (directions) on Thursday, December 10; there's an open house at 6:30pm and the presentation is at 7:00 (drinks afterwards).

Here's the planned subject of the talk, though I think I'll play it a bit by ear and see what people are interested in:

Seaside is a rare example of software that runs on all the major Smalltalk platforms: Pharo, Gemstone, GNU Smalltalk, Squeak, VA Smalltalk, and VisualWorks. We’ll take a look at some of the challenges in keeping the framework portable and some of the techniques the team has developed to deal with these. Along the way we may also touch on tools such as Grease, Slime, and Monticello and how they help the process. And then we’ll see where the discussion leads.

Fresh Tracks!

Wow. After the snowiest month on record, what a beautiful day for Blackcomb's opening. Much of the mountain was ice after yesterday's rain but that first run down untouched powder in 7th Heaven made the whole trip worthwhile. And the second run. And the third (ok, no longer untouched by this point). I'd almost forgotten how beautiful snowboarding can be on a sunny day.

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.

SIXX port for VASt

I just published an initial port of SIXX to VAStGoodies. Most of the tests are passing and I'll push the minimal changes I made back upstream for integration. Just like the Pier and Magritte ports I recently finished, this one was requested and released back to the community by Nationaal Spaarfonds.

The plan is to see if I can use SIXX for Pier persistency... that'll be the next step.

Pier for VASt

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I had uploaded an initial port of Magritte for VA Smalltalk. I've spent a couple of days since then (again courtesy of Nationaal Spaarfonds) getting the Pier port cleaned up and posted. Currently none of the add-ons have been uploaded but I have the security package mostly done and it will follow shortly.

Consider these alpha releases: they are being heavily updated to work with the newest Seaside (3.0a5 currently) and to sort out compatibility with different platforms. With that said, though, all of the Pier tests and all but four of the Magritte tests pass, so give them a try. You'll need the B130 development build of VA Smalltalk.

The original Pharo sources for these Seaside 3.0-compatible versions are available: pier repository magritte repository. Again, these packages are still in flux. They're now built on top of the same Grease portability layer as Seaside 3.0a5; I'd encourage interested platforms to give them a try and see how easily portable they are.

Magritte for VASt

Over the past month or so I have been doing some work for National Spaarfonds, including porting Magritte to VA Smalltalk. They are generously offering this work back to the community and I am happy to announce that I have just uploaded the first version of the VASt Magritte port to VAStGoodies.

You'll want to start with the VASt 8.0.1 [128] developer preview image and then load the configuration map from VAStGoodies. There are currently four failing tests: three caused (I think) by method inlining and one by differences in error handling behaviour. I haven't yet determined what (if anything) can be done about these.

A version of Pier ported to Seaside 3.0 and VASt won't be far behind but I have some more cleanup to do first in order to make sure it loads into a clean image.