GOTO Day 1

Day 1 of this years GOTO Aarhus is drawing to an end. It's time to recap. As always at a large conference there are a lot of things going on at once. So I may just have missed the action. But, well, to be honest I didn't get enough bang for the bug today. I had a hunch this was going to be the case today because too much of today's program seemed to be either too much talk and too little code for my taste or to be really introductory.
On the other hand there were highlights:

• Phil Calcados Javascript talk. Phil has been involved in recruiting at Soundcloud for a few years. As part of the interview process Soundcloud has candidates submit code in whatever language the candidate wants to. Interestingly Phil observed that a very high percentage of the submission done in Javascript were rejected, and the candidates did not make it to the next round of interviews. Submission in other languages did better. It is also noteworthy that there were actually a large percentage of the submission that were in Javascript - so the high rejection rate does not seem to be an artifact of sampling size. Phil talked about some of the problems in the Javascript submissions, what could be done about them and ventured guessed at why Javascript stood out in this way. Interesting stuff. 
  
• Mogens Heller Grabe's Rebus talk was by far the best talk of the day for me. It was concrete, had lots of code and it put some conplicated architectural ideas into fairly simple terms. Mogens talked about distributed system, anchoring the discussion firmly in reality by doing live demos of the patterns and by exmplifying based on his personal experience working with real clients. Great!
  

The part keynote will in a few minutes. So I'm off :)

The "Instant Nancy Web Development" Book

After a quick six month writing and editing process my Nancy book is published. It's available as e-pub, mobi, pfd and dead trees via the publishers site as well as Amazon, Amazon UK, and Safari.

What's it about?

Well, it about the Nancy web framework. Nancy is an awesome .NET based web framework that focuses on being both easy and fun to work with. Nancy lends itself to writing highly testable web application with simple, concise and readable code. Who doesn't want that?

The book starts from the very basics of getting Nancy up and running, but quickly moves into more interesting areas including dependency injection, hosting, content negotiation, authentication, async processing and more. Check out the full table of contents at the publishers site.

Who's it for?

The reader I've had in mind is a .NET oriented backend developer who values clean testable code and who is curious about what all the fuss around Nancy is about. It's a short book, so it is also a quick read and a quick way to get into a whole bunch of Nancy topics.

Why did I write it?

There are a number of reasons I wrote this book. I'll only talk about a few of them here. Starting from the egotistical side @thecodejunkie nailed it on jabbr: "It's about bragging rights" :-) I have to admit there is truth in that.

Another reason is that I really think Nancy deserves having a light shone on it, and I believe a book is one way to do that.
I believe a book can reach another segment of developers and architects than Github wiki, blogs and demo applications. The book hopefully wont be the end stage for those developers and architects, but rather the gateway to the Github wiki and even the Nancy source code, which is so readable that it actually is a fine source to learn Nancy from.
I also think a book can lend a sense of legitimacy to an OSS, which may help a little bit with getting through the gate into enterprises. @cranialstrain expressed this well on twitter the other day.

Impressions from Software Architecture Open Space 2013

We ran the 2013 edition of the Software Architecture Open Space conference (SAOS) this past Thursday, and once again I am amazed how well the open space format works. Everybody there were both highly knowledgeable and keen to share. The combination is a goldmine of learning opportunity.

Topics
The topics covered this year were quite diverse. Ranging from the particulars of Docker.io to the most effective place in an organization for an enterprise architect to work.

Since there were up to 7 seven sessions running in parallel I did not participate in all discussions. Even so just looking at the topics I had the chance to discuss paints a broad picture: "Event Sourcing in practice", "Modeling in NoSQL DBs", "How to Build an Architecture that Enables Flow in Development", "Reactive Manifesto", "NoProcess Development", "Architects and Organizations" og "The Value of Contributing in Open Source".

Take Aways
What one takes away from an event like SAOS obviously vary a lot lot from person to person. Personally the main points I came away with were:

• I am not the only one that thinks that lean thinking can be applied to software architectures, not just organizations and processes. Hallelujah I am not alone :-P
  
• Confirmation that Continuous Delivery is slowly but steadily becoming mainstream
  
• A better understanding of the role of Enterprise Architecture in large organizations (and confirmation that EA is not for me)
  
• Lots of new good contacts
  
• Insights into concrete experience with introducing event sourcing to a team and which type of common hiccups to expect