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Fwd: [xpportland] XPDX Wednesday March 18th: Ping Pong Pairing

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Subject: [xpportland] XPDX Wednesday March 18th: Ping Pong Pairing
To: xpportland@yahoogroups.com

Pair Programming has many benefits for a team above and beyond coding,
yet it's still one of the hardest XP practices to get into. Ping Pong
pairing is a lot of fun and is my favourite way to pair. It has a
game-like style that instils good pairing and TDD practices. So come
along to the next XPDX meeting to try it out. It doesn't matter if
you've been pairing for years or want to try it for the first time. This
will be a chance to learn from each other. We'll spend a little time
getting to know the mechanics of Ping Pong pairing, do a brief
demonstration, and then all pair up for over an hour of practice.

Absolutely positively bring a laptop with you. We'll be using Java,
JUnit, and Eclipse. A big time saver will be to ensure that you have the
Java *SDK* installed beforehand.

>>> Thanks to VersionOne there'll be pizza for thirty! <<<

Be there at 6:30pm for the pizza. We'll start at 7pm. At 9pm we'll move
on to a local bar.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 @ CubeSpace. Details on Calagator:
http://calagator.org/events/1250456785

This Just In: Functional Programmers Can Now Access Memory (Experimentally)

OK, type fanatics, get beyond my inflammatory headline already!

Actually, LtU points to an interesting paper (for some) on a bit of progress toward type systems for describing the correct use of resources.

Globals! Memory! Files!

As one comment points out, the pragmatic benefit of this work is sometime out in the future. Type systems will be good when they add more than they subtract.

They're not there yet, but there's (some) progress.

If Douglas Crockford Don't Care Why Should I?

At the end of this nice Google Tech Talk about Javascript good parts,
listen as Douglas Crockford (creator of JSON) pronounces "JSON"
incorrectly! (i.e. "Jason")

Also listen as various audience members pronounce if correctly... "Jay-SAHN".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook

Of course I am kidding - can't you PLEASE stop pronouncing it "Jay-SAHN"???

But why doesn't this bug Douglas as much as it does me???

Please, Don't... No, Go Ahead!

TweetDeck is a popular Twitter client. I use it. And Phil Windley has included it in his Top Ten List of Valuable Web Sites and Services ("makes twitter easier to manage/use").

TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop Flex application.

Wait a minute. Doesn't AIR *hurt* the web? Hmm.

Oh, right. AIR is simply a cross-platform application runtime with useful capabilities for running from and working with the web. Imagine.

Analysis Patterns and Contradictory Observations

I enjoyed _Analysis Patterns_ when Martin Fowler wrote that. Wow, it's
been 16 years. I found the book fascinating by discussing conceptual
topics, notdesigns. I really enjoy learning about all the various
worlds in which software is applied.

Martin recently wrote an update on "observations"...

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ContradictoryObservations.html

Interesting problems are hardly ever simple. Finding simplifying
patterns and (relatively) simple solutions to complex problems is
fascinating.

As this article points out, "simplifying" can mean finding the essence
of what is important without being "simplistic".

Slim FitNesse

I recently started exploring FitNesse for the first time. This began when someone pointed out the relatively new Slim protocol for using Fit tests with Systems Under Test. The primary benefit of Slim, as seen in the diagram below, is reducing the footprint of the framework in the SUT, and sharing a single implementation of the table interpreter. Improvements to the Fit interpreter do not have to be duplicated across multiple Fit implementations by multiple Fit f/w implementors.

I enjoy learning about various wiki implementations, generally. And FitNesse as a wiki has some interesting features. Mostly these seem geared toward supporting the wiki as a home for tests for multiple projects and multiple developers. I am always torn between the simplest wiki structures, such as the original c2 flat namespace, and structures such as confluence's spaces and hierarchies.

FitNesse has its own (as far as I know, unique) structure of subwikis. Essentially any page can begin its own sub-hierarchy, and the page name syntax allows for navigating and searching across the hierarchies above and below. This seems like a good thing, but I've not really used it yet.

Since I'd like a Fit tool for some fun projects, but I don't have modern Fit tools in the languages I'm using, Slim is the quickest path, and the whole FitNesse wiki comes along for free. I'd done a wee bit of integrating Fit and confluence along with http://twitter.com/ecopony and Slim FitNesse holds more promise for less effort.

lolcatslisp

From phil varner's photostream...

Roy Orbison

As long as we're in the neighborhood, stop by and say hello to Roy...

"Mean Woman Blues"...

"Down the Line"...

Rick Nelson

I was listening to, or trying to, Zooey Deschanel sing "Lonesome Town". I started feeling a bit queasy, until hopping over to the youtube to find this much better rendition by the great Rick(y) Nelson...

And here's "Hello, Mary-Lou" for good measure...

Now doesn't that make you feel so much better?

Google Tech Talk - Amy Jo Kim - "Game Mechanics"

I found this enjoyable and useful - this is probably a topic all
software developers should pay some attention to these days...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihUt-163gZI

Facilitation Skills

Merlyn writes up a piece on facilitation skills based on his
participation in AONW 2009 last week...

http://curious-attempt-bunny.blogspot.com/2009/02/aonw-2009-facilitation-skills.html

One of the "adds" we came up with in our host's retrospective last
Thursday was to add a page (on the wiki, in the packet, somewhere) on
facilitation skills for people interested in hosting a session at the
next AONW event.

Looks like Merlyn's got a good start, and hopefully we can get him to
help as we work on this... maybe a session during or before an XPDX
meeting.

Where do you use Smalltalk?

This question was asked recently at http://stackoverflow.com/questions

I love the responses that say, "It's great. But only use it with good developers that do unit testing."

Why would you use anything with any other kind of developer? And is the claim there is a tool that actually _works_ in those situations?

BTW this is not a new kind of comment from people. It just never ceases to amaze me that those follow-up questions neither seem to be asked nor answered.

What Do Nintendo, Squeak Smalltalk, and an EMCAScript-based OS Have in Common?

I knew some people at Nintendo have been doing something with Squeak Smalltalk. At least this aspect of that was not something I'd expected...

Using commands

From the command line shell, you can use the programs like below. Most of the commands are written in ECMAScript:

Command Name  Description
cat [file ...]  Prints the contents of files to the screen
cd [dir]  Sets the current directory to dir
clear  Clears the canvas for drawing graphics
date [-u]  Displays the current date and time.
echo [arg ...]  Prints the arguments to the screen
edit [file]  Edits text files
exit  Exits the command line shell
figure  Draws chars using the CanvasRenderingContext2D interface (A demo script)
ls [dir ...]  Lists names of objects in the directory
rm [file ...]  Removes the files
squeak  Squeak - a Smalltalk programming environment

Bertrand / Wm Leler at pdxfunc meeting - Feb 9, 7pm

This month, Wm Leler will talk about Constraint Satisfaction Systems
and the Bertrand Programming Language. Wm is the creator of Bertrand
and the author of the book "Constraint Programming Languages: Their
Specification and Generation".

Constraint Satisfaction Systems were a hot topic of research in the
80's -- famous constraint systems include Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad,
Alan Borning's ThingLab (built on top of Smalltalk), Guy Steele's
constraint language, and James Gosling's Magritte. These systems were
used for computer graphics, design, and general numeric problem
solving, but most of these solvers were domain specific and thus of
limited usefulness.

Bertrand is an equational programming system whose purpose is to build
constraint satisfaction systems using simple equational rules.
Bertrand has an purely declarative semantics and an absurdly simple
syntax, yet it is a powerful and expressive language, capable of
solving problems in a large number of domains including graphics, word
problems, electrical circuits, or -- with the right rules -- virtually
any mostly-linear domain.

Since this is the Functional Programming Study Group, this talk will
cover the underlying equational programming language of Bertrand and
ways in which it could be extended to make it more powerful.

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visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pdxfunc?hl=en
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Original Hotcake House

I was recently reminded how much I love the Original Hotcake House on Powell Blvd. here in PDX. Really, really, "diner" good. As captured in this review from alt.portland...

The hot cakes were absolutely hot cake-like, doused in some butter-like substance, and then served with something that is heated, but probably not pure maple syrup. Hell, it may contain no maple syrup for all I know (I saw some patrons bring in their own)!

...

The coffee looks scary—we didn't go there.

The coffee, like everything else, is great. It's just sitting in a pot over there, and you go up and pour yourself a cup, then squirt some milk into it from this big squirter thing.

Now I have to plan a trip there soon.

PITA

Ron Jeffries again...

"I often tell teams that apparently my purpose in life is to tell
people that the sensation in their butt is called "pain", and that
they should get rid of it."

http://xprogramming.com/blog/2009/02/02/discovering-essential-technical-practices/

Grade: Incomplete

Ron Jeffries writes...

Jeff Sutherland, co-inventor of Scrum, says he has never seen a Scrum team become hyper-productive without adopting the XP practices. Less elegantly, I have said that teaching Scrum teams how to get Done-Done is why I have such a lovely blue convertible...

Well, my dear little children, I’ve got bad news for you. It is your precious context that is holding you back. It is your C-level Exeuctives and high-level managers who can’t delegate real responsibility and authority to their people. It is your product people who are too busy to explain what really needs to be done. It is your facilities people who can’t make a workspace fit to work in. It is your programmers who won’t learn the techniques necessary to succeed. It is your managers and product owners who keep increasing pressure until any focus on quality is driven out of the project.

So Called

I get frustrated listening to smart people talk about things they are only marginally familiar with. Part I of this recording was interesting... people talking about their own experience with specific systems and practices.

Part II of this recording is frustrating because they've not called in anyone with experience with XP, and so debate XP as they understand it. Not that they don't have good experiences and smart things to say here and there. Just that this one could have been much better.

Good software development evolves from a team's conversation about what's working for them. The heart of XP in my experience are practices that foster a teams conversations. Those practices should themselves evolve from those conversations.

This recording has some good conversations, but mostly I am frustrated because I'd love to be a part of their conversation.

Agile Open Northwest 2009, Feb. 10-11

We've had two great AONW open space conferences, 2007 in Portland, and 2008 in Seattle.

This year we are back in Portland, close to the MAX, and as low-cost as ever: $125. There's still a bit of room to sign-up if you don't wait. The conference is Feb 10-11.

Agile Open Northwest 2009, the best open space conference in the world. Learn from each other at AONW 2009...

"These two-day Agile Open Northwest conferences are an extremely good value. ..[Y]ou learn directly from practitioners in the agile community what works and what doesn't. I attended the first two of these conferences, they were stunningly good... loads of practical, useful stuff and stimulating discussions." -- Ian Savage, PNSQC Program Chair