org.suls.blog

In the last four six months I was able to attend two very interesting conferences. First the QCon London in March and then WWDC08 in San Francisco in June. I was lucky enough to get free tickets as a student for both conferences and can't recommend it enough for any CS student. Let me describe each conference briefly:

QCon London (qcon.infoq.com)

InfoQ's QCon started off with two days of tutorials. I signed up for the Ruby/Rails combo on day one, followed by TDD with JMock on day two. The tutors (Dr Nic Williams, David Chelimsky/Aslak Hellesøy, Romilly Cocking/Steve Freeman) were all very competent and it made me wonder what uni would look like to have them as lecturers ;)
The conference itself (3 days) was mostly about Java/C# but there was room for a Functional Languages track and some Ruby as well. And yeah, I really had a chat with Mr. Gafter and was obliged to wear a Microsoft shirt (which I could switch with a O'Reilly  later on).

Apple WWDC (developer.apple.com/wwdc)

WWDC08 was mostly about the iPhone SDK and Mac OSX development in general. Since it was under NDA I don't think I can say too much.. However, I think I can go into the differences with QCon a bit. There were about 5 tracks about Testing at QCon whereas testing wasn't really mentioned at WWDC.
Also, if you're interested in the latest SE technologies you're probably better off at QCon.

However, I should mention the biggest similarity too: interesting people. It's difficult to meet more geeks anywhere else than at a geek conference ;)

Last wednesday the 3rd (?) Scrum Breakfast organised by Peter Stevens took place at namics in Zurich. I decided to attend with Cédric as part of the preparation for our upcoming bachelor thesis.
The event started at 8 am and I had the chance to meet Marc from umantis. He is about to apply Scrum on a project and therefore had many interesting questions. While talking about how to manage a backlog, Marcello who later gave the talk, joined our discussion. He introduced us to the idea of "story points" - an approach to classify a user story by it's complexity rather than estimating it's working hours.

Later on, Peter started the presentation by welcoming the 25 attendees and explaining that starting with this breakfast, the focus will be on case studies. Marcello took over and started his talk about his experiences on the WLC project. I am not going to summarise his presentation here as it is available online (thanks Peter). Although I would like to highlight some points he made:

• Planning based on story points. Rate the smallest work package as a 2.
• Customer day, Product owner on the team picture.
  
• Planning poker - motivate less senior developers to express themself by avoiding round robbing questionaires. Use poker cards! :-)
• Definition of done. Be sure the costumer and you understand the same..

The following discussion was mainly about how to apply Scrum on existing teams. Some serious problems were mentioned in terms of chief architecs or PMs not willing to loose responsibility. Marc also raised a question how to prevent burning out the team members by doing sprint after sprint. In response, Marcello and Francios Bachmann both pointed out the difference between a sprint and a marathon - you won't win a marathon by sprinting!


I must say that I hesistated before going to the scrum breakfast. I didn't know if a CS student was welcomed at kinda senior meeting. But after all I am more than happy that I took part and I am looking forward to the upcoming breakfasts. Hannes might be there as well the next time ;-)

sunset (25.11.07) Originally uploaded by ssulser
Well, let's put it this way: there are better and worse places to do a term project.. like, you know, the seychelles.

I introduced the idea of SuperHappyDevHSR about three months ago and it turned out not to take place as "soon" as I planned. However, right now I am happy to announce that SuperHappyDevHSR is going to happen at 29th November.



For more information check the shdhsr-Wiki and if you will attend please add yourself to the Attendees list at upcoming.org or at the wiki-Attendee site.

I finally released the first public¹ version of the HSR timetable widget last week. It's nothing fancy yet, but hey, at least something after one year of heavy development ;)



You can take a closer look at http://trac.sulsarts.ch/hsrspwdgt/. Feel free to add new tickets/requests!


[1]: public in the meaning of "able to browse the source". A downloadable package is planned for release 0.2

Some of you might already know that I'm trying to organise something like SuperHappyDevFlat at the HSR university. The event is called (surprise!) SuperHappyDevHSR and will take place in the first two weeks of the new term. If you're interested in, please vote for the dates which will suite you on doodle.ch.

For more information please drop by the shdhsr-wiki. And don't forget to add your own project/idea or suggestion where it should take place.. the more the merrier ;)

Due to the preparation of my upcoming semester thesis I want to extend my CruiseControl server with a Twitter publisher. The idea of getting the build status delivered to your mobile phone is quite exciting, isn't it?
However, it turns out it's not as easy as written in the example. I've implemented everything needed but still get the following exception:

Caused by: net.sourceforge.cruisecontrol.CruiseControlException: Attemping to load plugin named [TwitterPublisher], but couldn't load corresponding class [net.sourceforge.cruisecontrol.publishers.TwitterPublisher].

The plugin in the CC config file is loaded as follows.

<plugin name="TwitterPublisher" classname="net.sourceforge.cruisecontrol.publishers.TwitterPublisher"/>

Any ideas what possibly be wrong? I didn't find anything in the CC mailing lists.

Technorati Tags: cruisecontrol, java

My last post wasn't that self-explanatory as I expected. So I'm trying to make up for my lapses :)

Back in february this year I received an email from Apple saying that I can apply for a WWDC scholarship. A couple of weeks later I filled out the application and sent my CV to them. At this point I was never expecting to finally get the scholarship. Honestly.
However, last Friday it turned out that "they" welcome me at Moscoe Center from June 10th - June 15th which means I have to skip the university for week.

Not too bad considering I'll be attending the keynote =)

Due to my increasing boredom for studying (yeah: physics, computer networks and probability stuff) I restarted my development of the class schedule widget. I coded the first draft of the widget by hand back in November 2006. By now, Apple has released it's Dashboard development suite Dashcode and I decided to build my second draft with it.

Dashcode itself is still in the beta stage but it makes widget development already much easier. One good example is the use of the Scroll Area control:
You simply have to drag the "Scroll Area" control from the library to your widget, change the position, size and whatever.. but the tricky part comes with dynamic changing it's content. After a quick search in the Apple mailing lists I solved that problem as well:

// updating scrollarea
document.getElementById("content").innerHTML = myNewContent;
document.getElementById("scrollArea").object.refresh();

Sweet, isn't it ;-)