Programming

Two days, two conferences. The first was a local, business oriented one, Kasvu Open Forum. The second, Djangocon Finland 2012, focused mainly on technology. I gave two talks in the latter one. It was very nice to experience both events and meet some new people and a few old acquaintances. Kasvu Open ForumKasvu Open is a competition of sorts aimed for Finnish growth ventures. This is the second year they are organizing it so things are just about to get rolling. They have two series, one for ideas and one for established companies. Me and my business partner participated in the former one this year with an entry.We didn't make it to the finals and weren't impressed by the quality of the feedback given. This event totally made up for it. This is definitely something they can improve on the next year. The last thing you want to do is to discourage some potential idea or company. After all Kasvu Open is in the business of creating new business.You might expect business conferences such as this to be really boring. This wasn't the case here. Each talk given gave some unique view to growth venturing. For instance it was particularly interesting to see how different the mindsets of a venture capitalist and a business angel can be. Former focuses on profit while the latter thinks in more long term and uses a different kind of investment strategy.I also enjoyed the talk of Jouni Hynynen. He represented The Foundation of Finnish Inventions and explained how immaterial rights relate to business and what is their worth in practice. Even though I'm somewhat categorically opposed to concepts such as software patents, the talk gave some nice insight to the subject.Overall it seems like there is some positive buzz going on in the Jyväskylä area. It might not be the Silicon Valley and we might be missing the scale benefits. I wouldn't be surprised if something really interesting emerged from the area within the next decades. Djangocon Finland 2012This was the first time I visited the Finnish version of Djangocon. I think there were around forty people or so participating the event. The talks were primarily technically oriented. There were a couple of longer talks and several lightning talks.I actually met a reader of this blog (apparently there are those) at the conference. That was quite a pleasant surprise to be honest. It's small things such as this that make it all worth it.Thoughts on "Kaleva.fi - how we replaced 10 years of legacy code in one year"It was particularly interesting to see what Kaleva.fi looks like from "outside" in terms of DevOps. I participated in the project as a software designer during the past year for a period of a few months. So I got to know certain bits of it quite well. I never really looked into the overall infrastructure (too busy staring at my code :) ), though.There were many interesting tidbits in Markus' talk. Especially the bits on scaling the service were interesting. It's quite different to develop a service used by hundreds of thousands than something that has only a few users. You get a lot of new problems to solve.Thoughts on other talksThere was this one guy that made Django act like PHP. Django Home Pages is a terrible abomination that simply should not exist. I guess that was kind of the point, though. He created it just in order to see if it can be done.Leo Honkanen discussed about classy Django applications. I think the main gist here was that with some effort you can provide namespaced url lookups for your templates. Essentially you have to deal with routing using a proxy class that implements urls using a property. The proxy class contains the name of the namespace as a class level attribute. I believe it is possible to implement this as a class method so you can avoid instantiating the whole thing at your url definition.I'm not entirely sure if one should abuse classes this way. There might be a neater functional solution around to be found. If I ever need to namespace my urls somehow, I'll ke

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(Image Source: Wikipedia / Creative Commons / Author: VersionOne, Inc) Agile has been a hot topic in the industry. Many companies are converting their work teams into agile – some others, especially the big enterprises with decades of experience in waterfall model are choosing to be hybrid, experimenting stuffs. Google is a hundred percent agile company. In this article I have collected over hundred agile terms worth knowing if you are planning to shift to the Agile paradigm. This is just a list, you can Google the terms to find their meanings (although I plan to have another article sometimes later explaining these terms.) I have worked on the Waterfall Model for over five years now as a software engineer in Java/J2EE platform, and I have been recently assigned to work on an agile team. This is the first time I will have a real experience of working in an agile environment. I have taken few agile workshops and agile training in the past, I hope those will be helpful. So here goes the comprehensive list of agile terms. I plan to add more as I discover these terminologies. Keep coming back. 3 Amigos (Analyst, Tester and Developer) Acceptance Criteria Acceptance Test Driven Development ATDD Acceptance Testing Agile Agile Development Life Cycle Management Agile Manifesto Anti-Pattern Backlog Backlog Item Behaviour Driven Development BDD Burndown Business Value Add Chicken  Collocation Configuration Management Continous Integration Cross-Functional Team Cycle Time Daily Scrum Design Pattern Done Emergence Empiricism Enterprise Agile Epic Estimation Extreme Programming XP Feature Driven Development FDD Fibonacci Sequence Estimation Flow How Impediment Impediment Backlog Inspectig and Adapting INVEST model Iteration Just In Time Kaizen Kanban Key Agile Principles Lean Muda Multi-state Continuous Integration Nine-Box Interview Technique Non Value Add One Piece Flow Pair Programming Pairing Parallel Development Pig Planning Planning Poker Process Product Backlog Product Backlog Item Product Owner Pull Push Release Burn down Chart Release Plan Release Process Retrospective Roman Vote SCM Tools Scrum Scrum Master Scrum Meetings Scrum Roles Self Organization Software Change Configuration Management Software Configuration Management Software Development Software Development Process Source Code Control Source Code Management Spike Sprint Sprint Burn down Sprint Goal Sprint Planning Sprint Review Sprint Task Stakeholder Stand-Up Story Story Point Task Task Board Task List Team Team Member Test Driven Development TDD Theory of Constraints Throughput Thumb Vote Timeboxing U-Shaped Cells Unit Testing User Stories VOC – Voice of the customer Value Stream Value Stream Mapping Velocity Vision Statement WIP – Work In Progress Waste What Whole Teams Work Cells XP – Extreme Programming XP Practices Originally posted 2012-01-21 14:23:32.

Here's how this guy explained the concept of REST to his wife.

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The Outercurve Foundation has provided a summary (with links to presentations) of its recent open source software conference keynotes. Some of the speakers included Jono Bacon, Scott Guthrie, Ross Gardler, Donnie Berkholz and Kohsuke Kawaguchi. They spoke on topics ranging from Windows installation packages to community management, identifying destructive developers who ruin communities, project governance, patterns and practices that successful growing open source projects demonstrate, and how to wrestle with project growth and success.

Let’s face it, JavaScript hasn’t always had the best reputation among developers, and since the foundation of CoffeeScript back in 2009 this little language has taken the world of JavaScript developers by storm; mainly because it overcomes what some may say is the worst aspect of JavaScript: the syntax of its code.

New release of world-beating issue tracker focuses on faster, user-friendly interface.

I’ve been a professional programmer now for over a decade, and during this time I’ve met a LOT of excellent programmers. Most of them are partially autodidactic and learned the business side of programming in school. But non of these guru’s/experts use their skills to teach the next generations.

First what was kind of shocking for me was the fact to deal with ShrinkWrap at the end. Ok you can go with Arquillian without ShrinkWrap but it is not natural at all for me.