This spring there will be plenty of opportunity to meet and interact with Citerus' consultants!
We will be at Jfokus 2008 in Kista, Stockholm, January 30. Peter Backlund will talk about the Grails framework and I will give a brief talk about the Specification pattern. Citerus is also sponsoring Jfokus and you can meet us at our booth in the exhibition area.
Lena Norman and Mikael Lundgren will be presenting at the Lean & Agile Software Development conference in Stockholm Februrary 5-6.
We are currently discussing further speaking engagement for later this spring and early summer. Watch this space for more info.
Hope to see you there!
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Sunday, December 30, 2007
EOY
End Of Year
Here is an unimportant selection of what I did 2007 (in no particular order):
Music I listened to
- Kent - Tillbaka till samtiden
- José González - In Our Nature
- e.s.t. - Live in Hamburg
- Nelly Furtado - Loose
- Jenny Owen Youngs - Hot In Herre
- Rihanna featuring Jay-Z - Umbrella
Books I read
- Jerker Virdborg - Försvinnarna
- Ben Elton - Chart Throb
- Barry Schwartz - The Paradox of Choice
Blogs I read
- Engadget
- The Unofficial Apple Weblog
- Signal vs. Noise
- The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
- I, Cringley
- The Sartorialist
- xkcd
Series I watched
- Life on Mars, Series 2 - BBC
- Dexter, Season 1 - Showtime
Software I developed
- sventon - Subversion web browser
- Fulhack - the fancy TODO
- Specification - a Java 5 implementation of the Specification pattern
Gadgets I bought
- iPod Classic - to replace my old 3G iPod that had given up
- Wii - my first gaming console, ever
- Sun Jar - to store a little of that precious sunlight for when it gets dark
Happy New Year 2008!
Friday, December 28, 2007
Free Code!
Oh, one more thing. There is FREE CODE to go with the Specifications article. Running code examples are available in the Subversion repository at Google Project Hosting. There is also a JAR-file ready to download and use as basis for your own specifications. If you hurry you can get one of the first ten JAR-files I give away (no, unfortunately they are not signed...)!
Specification Project at Google Code.
Specification Project at Google Code.
Specification Pattern as a Refactoring Tool
There was a time when this blog was about software development. Nowadays it just seems to be a lot of whining. So it is time to change that. I actually did write a post about the Specification pattern detailed in Eric Evan's book Domain-Driven Design. But formatting the code examples for this blog turned out to be more of a hassle than I could deal with; so instead you'll find it in the latest issue of PNEHM!, Citerus' newsletter on software development: Specification Pattern as a Refactoring Tool.
The Specification pattern is nothing revolutionary, but it offers a nice way of encapsulating business rule logic that tend to be sprinkled all over your average business application. It is useful as a modeling and implementation concept when building systems from scratch, but can also be a powerful refactoring tool. The article will show you how.
And while you're at it, make sure to read the other articles in this issue of PNEHM!. You'll find interviews with both Ken Schwaber and Jerry Weinberg as well as a piece on Grails (in Swedish). Some people say it's our best issue ever.
P.S. Don't miss our classes on Domain-Driven Design and Strategic Design this spring.
The Specification pattern is nothing revolutionary, but it offers a nice way of encapsulating business rule logic that tend to be sprinkled all over your average business application. It is useful as a modeling and implementation concept when building systems from scratch, but can also be a powerful refactoring tool. The article will show you how.
And while you're at it, make sure to read the other articles in this issue of PNEHM!. You'll find interviews with both Ken Schwaber and Jerry Weinberg as well as a piece on Grails (in Swedish). Some people say it's our best issue ever.
P.S. Don't miss our classes on Domain-Driven Design and Strategic Design this spring.
Monday, December 03, 2007
Domain-Driven Design classes spring 2008
I'm very happy to let you know that Eric Evans is returning to Citerus and Uppsala this spring to host a new set of Domain-Driven Design open enrollment classes.
New for 2008 is that we have extended the immersion workshop Putting the Domain Model to Work to four packed days of presentations, discussions, modeling exercises and coding! This year I will give this class together with Eric which I'm sure will be great.
Eric will also give the two-day class on Strategic Design.
New is also the venue; we will be hosting this event at the brand new Uppsala Concert and Congress Hall which I think will be excellent.
This time around we have discounted fees for early registration, so head over to Citerus now to sign up:
New for 2008 is that we have extended the immersion workshop Putting the Domain Model to Work to four packed days of presentations, discussions, modeling exercises and coding! This year I will give this class together with Eric which I'm sure will be great.
Eric will also give the two-day class on Strategic Design.
New is also the venue; we will be hosting this event at the brand new Uppsala Concert and Congress Hall which I think will be excellent.
This time around we have discounted fees for early registration, so head over to Citerus now to sign up:
- Putting the Domain Model to Work, 4-Day Immersion Workshop, March 11-14, 2008.
- Strategic Design, Two-Day Workshop, March 17-18, 2008
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
sventon 1.3 now available for download
Release 1.3 of your favourite Subversion web client is now available for download!
Read more and download at http://www.sventon.org/!
Read more and download at http://www.sventon.org/!
Thursday, August 30, 2007
The Customer Service Paradox
You could say that I am somewhat sensitive in the customer service experiences department. I don't think I demand too much, I just expect things to work and for any problem that may occur to be handled responsibly in a timely fashion. Although rare, sometimes that actually happens.
I ordered a few things from the Apple Store the other day. The actual buying experience was as dreadful as always, but fulfillment was fast and I was to expect my order to be delivered by UPS a few days later. I usually try to stay away from receiving shipments to my residential home address. The delivery truck typically shows up when you're not at home, and it is a pain to later try to track down the forwarder to get your stuff. But since I was at home on vacation anyway, I made an exception this time.
Carefully tracking the shipment on the UPS web site I suddenly noticed that the delivery was in an exception state; UPS had failed to find my delivery address. This was around five in the afternoon. So I looked up the UPS contact info on the site and gave them a call. Pretty much immediately a human picks up the phone and inquires how he can be of service. No waiting in a long phone queue, no ten-levels deep interactive phone menu of "press one for great deals on shipping", "enter tracking number followed by pound", "enter phone number", and definitely no embarrassingly worthless natural language voice recognition crap that never works and makes you feel like you're a total moron with no communication skills whatsoever. None of that. Just a friendly voice. A friendly voice that asked a couple of questions and promised to contact someone who could help me get the shipment back on track. "If you haven’t heard anything within one hour call us back, we're here until 8 p.m.”
After about ten minutes another person from UPS called and informed me that the driver, a bit embarrassed, had admitted that he had failed to find my house. She asked for directions and told me to expect the shipment to arrive soon. After another twenty minutes or so the UPS man arrived and delivered my packages.
They had me by the human answering the phone. This is what great service looks like. You make it easy to report issues, and when informed about a problem you take responsibility, you own the problem, until it is resolved. You promise to call back, and you call back. You promise to deliver something, and you do deliver. In theory this is very easy. In practice, apparently surprisingly hard.
Great customer service story, eh? Except it really isn't. After all, this is UPS, you'd expect them to be able to read a map. Or if not, they could at least try to call the receiver to get directions, it is a listed number. They really should have been able to deliver the package without any of this. Had they done that everything would have been OK. The service would have worked, I'd have my stuff and think nothing more about it. But now, after this, I sit here writing a blog entry praising UPS.
And herein lies the paradox. A quick and effortless resolution of a problem is actually better received and remembered than a problem that doesn't occur in the first place.
Never underestimate the power of great customer support and outstanding exception handling.
I ordered a few things from the Apple Store the other day. The actual buying experience was as dreadful as always, but fulfillment was fast and I was to expect my order to be delivered by UPS a few days later. I usually try to stay away from receiving shipments to my residential home address. The delivery truck typically shows up when you're not at home, and it is a pain to later try to track down the forwarder to get your stuff. But since I was at home on vacation anyway, I made an exception this time.
Carefully tracking the shipment on the UPS web site I suddenly noticed that the delivery was in an exception state; UPS had failed to find my delivery address. This was around five in the afternoon. So I looked up the UPS contact info on the site and gave them a call. Pretty much immediately a human picks up the phone and inquires how he can be of service. No waiting in a long phone queue, no ten-levels deep interactive phone menu of "press one for great deals on shipping", "enter tracking number followed by pound", "enter phone number", and definitely no embarrassingly worthless natural language voice recognition crap that never works and makes you feel like you're a total moron with no communication skills whatsoever. None of that. Just a friendly voice. A friendly voice that asked a couple of questions and promised to contact someone who could help me get the shipment back on track. "If you haven’t heard anything within one hour call us back, we're here until 8 p.m.”
After about ten minutes another person from UPS called and informed me that the driver, a bit embarrassed, had admitted that he had failed to find my house. She asked for directions and told me to expect the shipment to arrive soon. After another twenty minutes or so the UPS man arrived and delivered my packages.
They had me by the human answering the phone. This is what great service looks like. You make it easy to report issues, and when informed about a problem you take responsibility, you own the problem, until it is resolved. You promise to call back, and you call back. You promise to deliver something, and you do deliver. In theory this is very easy. In practice, apparently surprisingly hard.
Great customer service story, eh? Except it really isn't. After all, this is UPS, you'd expect them to be able to read a map. Or if not, they could at least try to call the receiver to get directions, it is a listed number. They really should have been able to deliver the package without any of this. Had they done that everything would have been OK. The service would have worked, I'd have my stuff and think nothing more about it. But now, after this, I sit here writing a blog entry praising UPS.
And herein lies the paradox. A quick and effortless resolution of a problem is actually better received and remembered than a problem that doesn't occur in the first place.
Never underestimate the power of great customer support and outstanding exception handling.
This and more great drawings from http://xkcd.com/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)