The keynote by Robert C. Martin “Craftsmanship and Ethics” was all about agile processes and development. You couldn’t really ague the test are not good and the developers should have the best tools available. It was one of those talks where everybody nods and goes their separate ways and continues doing what they have always done. Good talk though.
Afterwards I went to a session by Pramod Sadalage where he talked about evolutionary database design with database refactoring. Pramod Sadalage is a co-author of the Martin Fowler series Database Refactoring book which I have on my to-read-list-but-have-not-have-found-the-time.
He tragically failed to deliver a point about database refactoring until then end of the session where most had lost interest. He kept on talking about continues integration and ANT script – this is all fine, but I expected some thoughts and ideas of how to do database refactoring without loosing business value and precious development time. Give me some pointers, tools or patterns!
I certainly need to reevaluate if the database refactoring book should stay on my list.
After lunch I went to a session about the functional programming language Erlang by the inventor Joe Armstrong. He is a great speaker and was able to keep most attendee’s at the tip of their toes, due to implicit knowledge of current hardware architectures in the talk. He confidently delivered his views of how concurrent development should be done – not the Java, C++ or C# way, but as a simple construct of the programming language. Concurrency in Erlang is based on message parsing instead of share memory.
The rest of the day failed miserably for me. None of the talk I went to was enlightening, made me think or inspired new ideas. I went to “Testing Database Access Code Programmatically” by Roy Osherove, “Information cards and .Net – Cardspace” by René Løhde and “An Introduction to Spring.Net” by Mark Pollack.
Most (in truth all) of my colleagues was better at choosing sessions and they especially talk positively about the session “Beautiful Debugging” by Andreas Zeller.
The rest of the day I served Miracle beer from our very own Miracle Brewery at the JAOO conference party. Apparently developers like Miracle beer, because all 400 liters were consumed.
I am looking forward to tomorrow and hope that I am better at choosing the right/high-class sessions.
Anders Lybecker is an chief architect at Kring Development A/S, a consultancy firm in Copenhagen, Denmark.
He holds a degree in software engineering specializing in software development.
His primary expertises are the Microsoft .Net framework and SQL Server which he has been working with since the start of this century!
He enjoys discussing technical topics, teaching and speaking at conferences. Related posts:
I’m sorry that my session about Database testing didn’t give you what you expected. If possible I’d love to know what was missing, or gone wrong with it so that I can do better next time.
Thanks,
Roy Osherove
Hi Roy,
My complaints about your presentations is due to most of it was about database state management – How to restore state after a database test. The possibilities you presented was manual rollback, Enterprise Services and TransactionScope. You did not address how to create database tests simple and efficiently.
I would have liked if you dug deeper into how to write the database unit/integration tests. Not only how to restore the state after a test.
At the end of the session you sang a song. I thing your song was funny, but you rushed through the end of the presentation just to be able to sing your song. You should have prioritized your presentation over you song.
Regards,
Anders Lybecker