It’s a very exciting day for Scott and for Microsoft as Scott Hanselman is joining Microsoft. He’s going to be working for Scott Guthrie’s organization. I’m excited to see what he does to re-attract the “Alpha Geeks” now. I’m sure that he’s going to do fantastic things and have an international impact.

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – Blue Badge

That’s Joe O’Brien on the left and me (Josh Holmes) on the right.

There are lots more photos at – Flickr: Photos tagged with erubycon

eRubyCon wrapped up yesterday.

First talk of the morning – I heard Muness Alrubaie and Dan Manges, both from ThoughtWorks, talking about Ruby and Agile on a large project with ThoughtWorks. They have 30 people working on a single app – all at one war table in a conference room in Atlanta for 10 hours a day 4 days a week. They pair with the guy next to them. They shift pairs on every iteration. They move extremely quickly. It was interesting to hear them talking about the challenges of working an agile project with that many people. One of the small changes was that they had to formalize the format of their story cards, estimation and such. On smaller teams, they could be a touch looser because people all knew each other and each others styles. They standardized on the desktop setup, toolset that they are going to use, configuration of the tools such as colors in the editors and other things that are usually personalized per developer or at least on a pair level. The big thing that would have been fantastic to see would have been a ton more on the gotchas and pitfalls to watch out for. These are hard to verbalize but important. Some of these can be inferred from the things that they had to alter for the the larger group. They didn’t go into detail on issues that they had with integration which I’m sure that they had with that many pairs making extraordinarily aggressive changes a language that’s a compact as Ruby is. That has to lead to stomping on each other occasionally. It was a fantastic talk – I just always want more. One thing is for sure – they are proving that agile can work in large projects.

Then I got to talk! This was a ton of fun. I’ll be honest, it was daunting to be speaking at eRubyCon and especially after so many fantastic speakers. My session was an introduction to Silverlight for Ruby programmers. My big demo was that I wrote a simple rails app that served up a Silverlight front end and then the Silverlight front end communicated back to the server via JSON. That was cool. I’ll be posting my slide deck here in a little bit. It’s not all my deck, I stole a lot of it from Scott Barnes and adapted it to work with my style and such. I did video the talk and plan on posting it at some point in the near future – but that’s going to take some work and time. I really wish that I had been able to show IronRuby off, but I don’t have any bits as they are supposed to drop next week. To quote John Lam, I had an “unfortunate timing issue” as the team is putting something out publicly next week.

After that I got to listen to Glenn Vanderburg with the closing keynote of the conference. He talked about a lot of the things that I’ve been talking (I need to blog a lot of this) about recently with IT as a cost center and how that’s dangerous. He had some great points about the implications of cost centers. In short, cost centers lead to wanting to cut down on the costs which leads to wanting to build things fast, cheaply and have them last for 30 years and are easy to update and change constantly to meet new requirements and regulations. He quoted Scott Bellware quite a bit and talked about the process of “Software Creationalism”. In short, Scott’s (and Glenn’s) contention is that the vast majority of tools and frameworks out today are all about the point of creation of software and don’t have nearly enough focus on the ongoing survivability and maintenance of the application. That results in “The creation of software is easy but the changing of software is hard”. I strongly agree that this is the current state of the discipline. Obviously, his conclusion is that what the enterprise needs is agile development. “To make it easier to change software, then built it by changing it”.

Another great quote – “If that’s not a one line change, then we need to refactor until it is.” – Glenn Vanderburg, eRubyCon 2007.

Software Creationalism – Scott Bellware [MVP]

I’m speaking at eRubyCon next week (7/16-7/18) joining the other speakers such as Neil Ford, Justin Gehtland, Jim Weirich and Joe O’Brien among many others. It’s going to be an exciting conference. I’m speaking on Silverlight (keep scrolling down – it’s about halfway down). Here’s the Abstract:

Introduction to Silverlight

Silverlight is the latest in the continuum of technologies from Microsoft to help you create differentiated user experience in the supplemented web space. Based on XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) for its UI and backed by a number of different options for logic including C#, JavaScript, Visual Basic, IronPython or IronRuby (once it’s released) – it’s a exciting new tool in the back of tricks for any web developer. It brings with it a rich networking stack, fantastic media support, scalable vector graphics and much more on both Windows and the Mac in all of the major browsers including IE, FireFox, Safari and Opera. In this session, we will explore the boundaries of Silverlight, see the integration points and hosting options between Ruby and Silverlight and talk some about what’s coming with IronRuby.

I gotta say, it’s been a ton of fun putting together this session (not implying that I’m done). I’m playing with so many new technologies and ideas that I’m sure that I’m doing things exactly wrong but it’s fun and I’ve got a cool demo working. I wish that I had IronRuby bits, but the IronRuby bits are to be released at Oscon the following week according to John Lam…

erubycon – Columbus, Ohio

I’m actually really surprised at how well it pegged me.

Your programmer personality type is:
DHTB

You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.
You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.
You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it’s parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.
You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

What’s your programmer personality?

The fantastic deck that Chris Bernard, Denny Boynton, Larry Clarkin, Phil Wheat and Josh Holmes (that’s me) took on the road to 18 cities on our ArcReady tour is up and available for downloads.  

Microsoft ArcReady – Downloads

A while back I posted about Scott Hanselman‘s 32 Ways to Keep Your Blog from Sucking post. At some point later, I created a slide deck to tell the story. Since then, I’ve given the presentation a few places and Scott even borrowed the deck to do a presentation to a number of the Developer Evangelists in the US.

Anyway, here’s the deck that I created…

| View | Upload your own

See the original post at 32 Ways to Keep Your Blog from Sucking by Scott Hanselman

Cool news – we’ve got dates already for MIX08! 

You should keep an eye on that site as they sold out a month early this year.  

Link to News : Mark your calendar and save the date for MIX08! : Visit MIX07

I found this via UXMag.

It’s advice to freelance designers but it works in so many different arenas. Consulting is the obvious play, but think about this in terms of your politics at your corporation and even in your personal life. If you’ve coached soccer or anything, you’ll have at least 6 of the 12 types below as parents.

The twelve that he talks about with my own little summaries are:

1. The Low-Tech Client – This client is disoriented by tech and wants everything no the phone or fax.

2. The Uninterested Client – This client just wants you to handle everything.

3. The Hands-On Client – This client is disillusioned that they could do your job and will tell you so.

4. The Paranoid Client – This is the legal nighmare with NDAs and you fearing that you’ll be sued.

5. The Appreciative Client – This client is sugary coated suger with sugar filling. It’s not a bad life to be honest but don’t get used to it.

   <update>A comment was made offline that one should watch the Appreciative client to make sure that they are not a “Stab you in the back with their management” client…</update>

6. The Get-a-Good-Deal Client – This client never saw a price or deadline they couldn’t negotiate in their favor.

7. The I’ll-Know-It -When-I-See-It Client – This client will cause revision after revision after revision.

8. The Always-Urgent Client – This client thrives on drama and adrenalyn and everything is a fire.

9. The Decision-By- Committee Client – This client never saw a decision they could make.

10. The Doormat Client – This client lets you walk all over them.

11. The Budget Client – This client wants the same service for half the price. Similar to the Get-a-Good-Deal, but with less money.

12. The You-Should- Be-So-Lucky Client – This client will make sure that you know how lucky you are to be working for them and in the industry that they are in…

For each of these, he talks about How to Spot One, the Highs, Lows and How to Work With One.

For example, with the “Get a Good Deal Client”, the How to Spot One talks about always haggling over procing and promising more lwork later. The Highs talk about repeat and referral business but the Lows are that you are constantly having to negotiate and might get taken advantage of. In the How to Work With One section he talks about coming in high and being very assertive on points of payment and workload.

All of this is absolutely priceless advice. The reality is that in a corporation or contract of any size, you’re going to have a mix of some or all of the types above and you have to be ready to deal with that. You need to know who it is that actually writes the checks and who they have to report to. If your contact is an Appriciative, but their boss is an Always-Urgent, you need to know that and act appropritely. There’s no point in satisfying your contact if the checks are signed and decisions are made higher up.

The question is, can you name your boss’s type? What about your current contract?

Link to » 12 Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them

I’m way behind on blogging all of the things that I’ve run across in the past couple of weeks.

I found this video with Scott Holden and Derek Synder showing Silverlight running on a Windows Mobile 6 device. This is a very early prototype so they didn’t commit to a time frame, feature set or anything else but it’s cool. Of course, now that they’ve shown it and gotten some serious buzz going, I’m assuming that they will have to ship something in this space and we’ll get more details on that as time goes on and we get closer to the Silverlight 1.1 release.

I also really like that device but I doubt that it’ll be out on Verizon any time soon.

Source: YouTube – Silverlight for Windows Mobile