Charles Engelke's Blog

Ward Cunningham and Brian Ingerson are giving this talk. The focus in on
extreme programming (XP) which requires continual testing. We start with an
example from Ward Cunningham of financial interest calculations, which are based on the
assumption that each month has 30 days, and each year has 360 days. So he
defined tests with a list of sample cases and expected results, and uses a
tool to run the tests for that list. Fill in the table, then send the table
to the testing tool, and get a table back with what should have happened,
versus what did happen. When the tests were all passed, he added another
test (another row), which failed. He fixed his code: now the new text
worked, but the old ones were broken. This is a simple way to make sure
that you don’t lose what you used to have when you fix or extend code.

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During the break I went to the newly opened exhibitor area. It’s packed
with vendors and attendees, and there’s some swag this year! I didn’t see
any swag at last year’s conference, and little the year before that (in 2000
in Monterey, there was so much swag that I was able to bring dozens of
t-shirts back for my colleagues). So the Stonehenge t-shirt and Powell’s
juggling balls may signal that the IT economy is getting well.

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Paul Buck is IBM’s director of Eclipse Development. We’re going to get
an introduction to Eclipse
this morning. IBM donated Eclipse to the open
source community in 2001, worth about $40 million.

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Tim O’Reilly opens this year’s conference with this talk. He begins with
the definition of paradigm shift: a change in world view that
calls everything you know into question. This is from

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn.

First, we had a hardware paradigm shift: commodity hardware with an open
architecture with the IBM PC. This resulted in killing off old proprietary
hardware companies: Digital, Data General, Prime. Apple is the last
remaining company in this space. We then had a software paradigm shift (IBM
let a tiny Seattle company provide the operating system for their PCs).

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Today the real conference begins; Monday and Tuesday were tutorial days.
Now we will be attending shorter talks, and many less technical ones.

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Once I decided not to go back to the Struts tutorial, I looked around to
see if I could sneak in to something else. I saw that
Mark Jason Dominus was giving his
Tricks of the Wizards
Perl talk. I’ve seen it before, but he keeps doing new things. And,
he’s probably the best presenter I’ve ever seen, so I know it will be
interesting.

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This morning I’m going to learn about enterprise Java on a budget. I
hope they mean a small budget. I’ve already seen lots of options to
do it on a big budget, and I’m skeptical that those expensive ways of
doing things really return proportional value to us. This talk is being
presented by Christopher Judd and Brian Sam-Bodden. They’re both expectant
fathers, and they’ve told us that they would actually treat their wives
going into labor as a higher priority than this session!

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This afternoon I’m attending a tutorial on using Struts to build web
applications. As with my Enterprise Java Development tutorial from this
morning, I don’t have experience with this language, so I’ll have to wait
and see if I can follow enough to be useful.

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I’m browsing the official conference web site, and what do I find? A
photo
of conference alumni Craig Fitzgerald and Ricardo Havill! And a couple of
other random conference attendees.

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We finished up writing the DocBook files with a pointer to
DocBook: The
Definitive Guide. The whole book is available on-line.

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The conference is providing wireless networking, which is great. But it
has been totally flaky today. It comes and goes, it changes subnets,
sometimes it doesn’t route beyond the gateway. It’s been working this
afternoon, mostly, and we have a possible explanation for some problems.

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I’m at my second tutorial of the day, on DocBook, an XML DTD for
technical documentation. I’m not really looking at this from an open source
project perspective, just as a general tool. I have a feeling that this
would be a good thing to use in general. The peaker is Bob Stayton from
Sagehill Enterprises.

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We’re just about to start the session, provided by Mike Fitzgerald of
Wy’east Communications. He’s starting by telling us about some of the
books he recommends:

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I’m on my way to Portland for the
O’Reilly Open Source Convention,
listening to two little girls right behind me arguing over whether one of
them is cheating on a card game. We’re on the ground in DFW, where my
“direct” flight from Atlanta to Portland has a stop. Always read the
fine print, folks.

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