Video of the one-hour overview presentation that Jez and I gave at YOW at the end of last year. We cover the rationale for Continuous Delivery, the deployment pipeline, continuous integration, devops, and deployment strategies. The highlight is Jez’s personification of a release candidate as a hero in a greek myth.

EÌ€ze, France

I've given lots of presentations, and since I go to a lot of conferences I see a lot too. This means I see a lot of problems, where people are doing things that reduce the efficacy of their talks. I've not tried to come up with a comprehensive list, so the ones I'm raising here are just a few things off the top of my head. Like most smells, these aren't always wrong, but should always make you think.

more ...

This weekend, ThoughtWorks is hold a recruiting event in New York City. The idea is to compress the whole recruiting cycle down to a single weekend. The coding problem will be on Saturday, and those that pass that hurdle will be invited back for interviews on Sunday. The idea is that we’ll get job offers to any successful candidates by Sunday evening. I’ll be there for the first couple of hours on Saturday.

Pramod and I have put together a short infodeck (pdf) outlining the reasons why NoSQL databases are an important new dish on the software development menu. It’s directed at non-technical managers and customers to provide an outline of why the data world has seen this new entrant and some direction as to the kinds of projects which should give them a closer look.

Stowe, VT

QCon invited Rebecca and I to do a keynote at QCon London (March 7). Over the last year or so we’ve been seeing more and more of a change in how organizations think about data, so that seems a natural choice to talk about. Our clients are seeing larger volumes of data, that they need to analyze more quickly and more cleverly. We’re seeing different technologies for data storage that have loosened the vice-like grip of relational databases. And we find our profession needs to start thinking about what our responsibilities are in managing all of this information.

I’ve long been a fan of the podcast series Software Engineering Radio. The team there have built an excellent series of podcasts on various aspects of software development and I often listen to them while taking my afternoon walk. So I’m glad to get a spot on there myself. In this episode I’m on the program with Rebecca Parsons, my colleague and co-author of my DSL book to talk about DSLs. We talk about what DSLs are, the differences between internal and external DSLs, and when you should (and shouldn’t use DSLs). The episode is hosted by Markus Völter, who, of course, is a considerable expert on DSLs too - so it’s really a three way conversation on the topic.

Over the last couple of years several of my colleagues have been organizing code jam events where developers get together to write software for charitable causes. A good example is a regular code-jam in New York that works on RapidFTR. Chris George, a ThoughtWorker based in New York, helped organize a one-off event in New York in August 2010. The group didn't get as much done on the day as they had hoped, but in a bar afterwards decided to try to get together more regularly. Since then they've been meeting every week. It's a small group, still mostly ThoughtWorkers and friends, with a core of 3-4 people rising to a dozen when we've had a big project in town.. (Chris is happy to have more people join the group, so if you are interested drop him an email.)

Many people have found these events to an enjoyable way to use our skills for purposes that we find rather more fulfilling than many day jobs, and a way both to learn new skills and learn from a different group of people. So I thought I should share our thoughts on how to set one up.

more ...

Boston, MA

One of the first topics to spring to mind as we worked on NosqlDistilled was that NoSQL databases use different data models than the relational model. Most sources I've looked at mention at least four groups of data model: key-value, document, column-family, and graph. Looking at this list, there's a big similarity between the first three - all have a fundamental unit of storage which is a rich structure of closely related data: for key-value stores it's the value, for document stores it's the document, and for column-family stores it's the column family. In DDD terms, this group of data is an aggregate.

more ...