During the course of the podcast I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Rini has a very sensible view of things and also introduces the interesting angle that Scrum, being so heavily dependent on constant communication, can actually be a means of improving the collaboration of distributed. Throughout the interview it is very clear that he really understands and embraces Scrum, is keenly aware of the challenges that result from having distributed teams and makes sounds suggestions for overcoming them without making any bold claims to having found a universal solution.

I am also very taken with the fact that he is very cautious regarding tool use, names the right (in my humble opinion) reasons for doing distributed scrum (cost, most notably, not being one of them) and that he stresses the fact that even distributed teams should be seeing each other frequently.

I suggest you check it out.

Source code will end up on GitHub once we clean everything up a bit, or early in the next year, whichever comes first.

Here’s an in-context view of the Indicator:

And this is part of what makes it tick, just in case you’re curious:

(via @gruber)

Press Release

At least for a suitable definition of London, I guess. As it turns out I ended up about an hour’s train ride from what is considered “London” in the sense of “yes, I want to be there”. Short-termed (i.e. four weeks) as the engagement was I got to meet and work with some nice people, got to pity a somewhat disorganized client and add a line to the list of CQ projects I’ve been involved in.

Lessons learned:

• Given the choice, favour Thistle Hotels over the Travelodge.
• Given the choice, don’t take the plastic bag full of processed food that passes as a breakfast in the Travelodge. For GBP 4.50 you can get a better breakfast virtually everywhere else, including, but not limited to that franchise with the golden arches.
• OSGi declarative services rock.
• Manage your expectations. If your JSP developers don’t even know JSTL properly, there’s only so much benefit you’ll get from using CQ.
• Coming home early from an out-of-country assignment is always nice, even if it costs you a weekend in London proper.
• Seamlessly switching between a Mac with a German keyboard layout and a Windows machine with a UK keyboard layout takes some getting used to.

Details bald hier.

All that remained was a historic printout of of the cfront source code.
C++ was ultimately lost as the cfront source was burned to ashes by a gang of rogue language designers on the night of 2th of May 2013.

Then I woke up. The dishes were still dirty and C++ was still there. *Sigh*

So why? Why is it that a discipline that has permeated so many areas of our daily life, from business to entertainment has to be likened to something else? And by no other than a seasoned practicioner of that discipline, too – Google’s own James Whittaker?

Honest Answer – I have no idea. So let’s just not do that anymore, please! As IT professionals we enable so many people in so many ways. Virtually everybody in the connected world reaps the benefits of our successes and suffers the consequences of our failures in some small  way. We do what we do and if we want people to appreciate it (more) we need to explain what we do. I just don’t think that a misguided comparison will get us any closer to such an explanation.

Definition Technische Fluchtdistanz
Wenn man als Consultant einen eher fachlich angehauchten Kunden oder Kollegen dermaßen mit Implementierungsdetails bedrängt, dass dieser schlagartig den Raum verläßt, mit der fadenscheinigen Begründung jetzt an einem außerordentlich angesetzen Meeting teilnehmen zu müssen, wird dieses Verhalten mit der Überschreitung der Technischen Fluchtdistanz beschrieben.