Willem van den Ende, entrepreneur and independent consultant

Sometimes attendees say a conference changed their life.
Perhaps.
If you changed your life as a consequence of participating in an an event, it is you who changed it.
Investigators, on TV at least, look for motive and opportunity for a crime.
For something positive it can be much the same.
Who had the motive? You had the motive to attend the conference, ask questions, perhaps propose a session around something you wanted to share, and you had the motive to do something with it after the fact.
The conference may have provided the opportunity.
In fact, you also supplied part of that opportunity for others, by bringing your questions, interests, observations and puzzles.

Last friday I was working on a minimal webshop for the QWAN Code smells & Refactoring cards. I created a small order form on top of a web service to process the orders. It wasn’t much work, a basic service plus javascript widget took me about a morning.

When it was time to integrate with the payment provider, I read through various options. My aim was to go live within a day, so I was looking for the least amount of work that could get us to process payments and ship cards to our customers.

The two main optios were creating an integration through our web service or using a Buy now button that ‘integrates’ as a snippet of html on the shop page.

And then it hit me, that if we let go of something we wanted (volume discounts), we could also have the entire order form behind the providers Buy Now button. Customer data such as the shipping address and the customers’ e-mail gets mailed to us. That is good enough for now, it is unlikely we’ll be selling millions of units for this. The widget and service I wrote would not be needed, which saves us work deploying the service and making sure it keeps running.

So I let go of the code I wrote, and put together the Buy now button.

There are two outcomes of product development:

• the product,
• the learning.

I kept the learning and threw the product away, because there is no code like no code.

Stephan Eggermoint coined the best code is no code for our Back to the future, (re)learn Smalltalk session. He was referring to database mapping code. If there is no database mapping, for instance with an OO database, there is also no code.

I was having a chat with Jason Ayers last week, and he was pondering a no code movement.

As a product person, it requires you to be flexible with your constraints. As a developer, you have to be un-invested in the code you write. How many teams do you know that do that?

The fall conference season is already in full swing. Apparrently I need some time away from actual work to publish some writing.

Was last month already. Enjoyed it more than expected. A ‘boots on the ground’ kind of conferences where most presenters are actually doing something – developing, shipping products, doing user experience work etc. Enjoyed Joh Hunt’s and the Agile Pirate’s non-dogmatic hands-on session on working through “your big rocks” a lot. They are developing a brainstorming card deck to help you get unstuck, or facilitate a friend or colleague in tackling difficult problems. They developed the first versions by applying it on themselves, as it should be in coaching. Change is not (‘just’ ) for other people.

Tomorrow and Friday in Tallin, Estonia. I’ve already enjoyed Chris Frei’s hospitality, Rags Srinivas’ company and great food plus drink yesterday, today’s breakfast and sports facilities followed by a historic city tour and dinner. Many of the session organisers turned up already. I didn’t know any of them, the ones I talked to are doing a variety of really interesting things (the others as well probably ) and I enjoyed the open conversations and interest in each others’ work.

I’m looking forward to Friday’s security workshop in particular. Estonia seems to be an IT heavy place with prime ministers that used to be software developers, and the focus on security and cryptography seems to be strong here. It’s an area I don’t know much about, so all the more opportunity to learn.

I’ll be talking about Using diagrams of effect to visualize dynamics of technical dept in product development and DevOps experiences from a business perspective. The latter one is an interesting puzzle. Some people want more people to discuss people issues/benefits in DevOps (this is a blog. shoot first, provide references later ). As opposed to just talking about Devops ultralight – configuration management tools , where DevOps light is ‘when people zoom in on ‘just’ dev and ops collaboration’. Devops is not about a technology, devops is about a business problem. Since there is potentially a lot of ground to cover on this one, I’ll give the audience room to express their preferences and ask questions. For instance there is also a more technical introduction to Chef if the audience happens to be mostly developers.

Nottingham, November 12. Rob Westgeest and I will be doing Dirty Jobs, letting participants add a feature to some realistic fantasy legacy code inspired by hairy code we encountered but can’t publish. Looking forward to participating in the Lego Mindstorms workshop at night and doing some data visualization in Javascript.

Trying to break out of an endless loop of reflection from the questions they ask in order to get vetted for participation. I tried many things, some of them don’t (yet) lend themselves to easy conclusions. I wrote about one (being JustADeveloper for a change and not working from a position of authority) and ended up with 80 lines. I should edit that down and post it when I get a round tuit.

Just paying an entry fee would be much cheaper for me, but having to think and write about an experiment is much more valuable. If I get in, I’d probably like to test drive some raspberry pi (see xp days benelux below).

It should still have space – around 50 people signed up. So what is stopping you?

Heeze, Netherlands November 29th and 30th. Already sold out, so just letting you know what we are working on.

TDD on an embedded device . I’m about to order a soldering iron, an arduino and some lcd displays in addition to the raspberry pi’s we already have. Rob Westgeest and Marc Evers are already hacking away with hardware as we speak. We believe the envelope in embedded development can be pushed a lot further (and have seen/done this in some places).

Now I’m writing this: Trying out hardware/software co-development in a distributed team was an unexpected consequence of proposing this workshop. Doing a fully embedded version of an exercise was on our wishlist for years, I’m really glad the pieces are coming together.

Who’s dropped the ball To celebrate 10 years of xp days Marc and I do a one time reprise of a workshop we ran quite a bit in 2003-2005. Expect many balls to be flying and dropping, diagrams to be drawn, and above all, stories to be told.

So who knows, maybe I’ll see you around