Infernus

I’ve just been propelled across the project barrier and into our GWT project. A project which took over 10m to compile … and so I spent yesterday updating our Maven scripts to use the latest version of the plugin, and investigating speeding it up. GWT generatates output based on (browsers supported) * (locales supported). Even [...]

Our client has just jumped from WLS 10.1 to 10.3. Unfortunately, Oracle have decided a point release was a great time to upgrade the required JVM to 10.6, so I’m back to struggling to get things working. Currently, the best way seems to be: 1. Hack your JVM WebLogic’s installer won’t detect the Apple JVM [...]

Jeff Patton opened his presentation with some advice on giving speeches: start late, finish early and don’t discuss anything you don’t understand. True to this advice the session started a little late, but proved to be well worth the wait. His premise was that while XP teaches you to question your practices we nevertheless seem [...]

Tuesday afternoon was polished off with the intriguingly titled ‘XP: My Greatest Misses 2000-2008′. Presented by J. B. Rainsberger, the founder of XPDay North America, it documented some of what he considered to have been his biggest mistakes since his conversion to the XP camp in 2000. He came to XP while working at IBM, [...]

Johanna Rothman, author of Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies and Nerds, was responsible for an interesting session on Tuesday afternoon. Her topic was Hiring for an Agile Team, and her premise was that it is primarily people, not skills, that make your agile team successful. She differentiated hiring for a traditional team by stating [...]

After the keynote I retreated from the ballroom to a meeting room hidden in a corner of a mysterious mezzanine, where I heard Clinton Keith of Highmoon Studios talk about agile in the gaming industry. Starting from a position of describing the evolution of the gaming industry from a producer of mass titles into one [...]

Agile 2008 opened at the somewhat startling time of 8:30 with a keynote by journalist James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds. He opened with an anecdote about the experiences of Francis Galton, famed both for statistical science and infamous as the coiner of the word ‘eugenics’, in relation to the surprising accuracy of [...]

For my sins, I find myself sitting in a hotel in Toronto, watching the rain steam down the windows. To be fair, I could have done this at home in London, a city in which clement weather is but a month. Instead I’ve been shipped 8 hours west, across the Atlantic and dangerously close to [...]

My mobile is fubar, so if you need me, e-mail me. Bloody Windows phones…

As my holiday comes to an end I was stricken with a thought. Recently, we decided to reorganise the office to make better use of space. We moved management and support into the [overly sized] Wii room, put the Wii in the little office and tried to move developers, architects and BAs around the main [...]