Jfokus presentations now online

Presentations from Jfokus 2008 are now available. You'll find my presentation on the Specification Pattern as well as my collegue Peter Backlund's Grails presentation here. (in Swedish)

Windows + IE for success...

Psychology of Golf

I used to play golf, this was a few years ago now. And I must say I consider Mark Twain mostly correct when he called golf "a good walk spoiled". One of the problems with the game, besides the fact that I sucked at it, is the way The Swedish Golf Federation has the handicap system set up. As soon as you beat your current handicap you get a new one, reduced with whatever number of strokes less you got compared to your current handicap, times some factor, initially 0.5. So, effectively, your current handicap becomes a record of that one time when you played your best game ever. But in your mind your handicap is the lowest expectation of what you should manage to play to. Not playing to your handicap will be considered a failure. So golf becomes a game of playing and failing, and failing, and FAILING!

Most of the time will be spent feeling worthless. But now and then you will actually manage to play to your handicap, which is a zero outcome, it’s expected. Rarely, you will manage to beat your handicap, which probably will make you feel a bit happy. Of course that feeling will be immediately erased next time you play, replaced with the feeling of worthlessness, because now you have a new handicap. Depressing.

Now, people say that as you get better the curve levels off somewhat, i.e. the conversion factor becomes smaller. But I never made it that far, so I never saw that side of the game.

OK, enough of a segue, this is what I want you to read: Psychology of Tests, Testing and TDD

Audio interview with Eric Evans

I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Eric Evans a couple of weeks ago over Skype. The result is now available as a thirty minutes long audio interview on the topic of Domain-Driven Design published in PNEHM!

Audio interview with Eric Evans

Jfokus followup

Slides from the Jfokus 2008 presentation are now available for those of you who care.

Example source code and specification.jar are available from Google Project Hosting.

If you attended the talk please let me know if you have any questions or feedback.

Updated: Fixed spelling

Citerus Live!

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!

EOY

Entertainer Of the Year
Entrepreneur Of the Year
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!

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.