Owen's Blog

Ok I’ve had a hectic start to a new week. Which I’ve managed to pull of the best freebies ever.

More about those in a minute, first a little backtrack.

I went home on the weekend in order to take some of my bigger possessions home, the stuff that I’m not leaving/throwing away when i move to New Zealand (so mainly just stereo equipment).

As such i hired a car and cruised on home. The weekend also allowed me to confront a personal demon and confession to my parents over the amount of debt I’ve managed to run up. They were shocked and essentially I have managed to blow any proceeds from a recent sale of one of my dad’s properties, but now I’m back in the black thanks in no small part to the wonderful generosity of my parents. Yet another reason to realise I’m a spoiled brat.

Anyway we returned on Sunday and last week I’d received notice that I’d managed to win some tickets to see the BlueManGroup

Which was nice. So we went to see them on Monday.

A fab musical extravaganza, but i can’t help but feel that maybe I felt it was good because i didn’t have to pay for it. The whole thing is very commercial with a desperation to sell as much merchandise and i thought some of it was long winded and I’ll thought out. But i enjoyed some very special moments in it that made me laugh and smile. You suddenly realize that you’ve been laughing hysterically and no one has said a thing on stage. Very good physical comedy.

So yesterday i was feeling very tired when Katy sends me an Instant Message saying shes just been offered tickets to go see the Scissor Sisters charity Halloween gig. Too good an opportunity to miss! so we rushed to try and find some quick costume ideas and ended up with some tacky wigs and standing in a room full of devils, angels and all kinds of ghouls.

I didn’t get any pics but they are starting to appear on Flickr

[Edit: BBC came through with a proper image]

As you can see it was a very entertaining affair. although i did feel the gig dipped significantly just before the encour (of take your momma out, i don’t feel like dancing, and filthy/gorgeous).

So I’ve had some very enjoyable days

technorati tags:bluemangroup, scissorsisters, gig, concert, london

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So, iouk.com/bgeek.net/bgeek.eu have been in a state of flux for the past couple of weeks, as i moved over to a new Content Management System on my servers. All the admin is now done, all that remains is for me to play with the system a little and see if it all works as well as i hope.

also changed were the other sites i host, katycongreve.com and a now very pro looking robevans.info

I might have to ask for some credit on the site so that maybe i can get some links off there.

please go and visit to see what’s going on with my brothers plays/works in progress. of course he’s also got an alter ego at mustaphajones.blogspot.com

Apart from that life is going on a pace, only 3 months to go to NZ. ARGGGHHHH

ps. I hope Katy gets better soon, she not feeling too well and i feel a bit helpless

technorati tags:robevans, iouk, katycongreve, bgeek

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Katy just took some fab shots of the sunrise i wanted to share

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Hey all, thought some people might like to know that Katy has a shiny new site at: www.katycongreve.com

also we are getting on well living together, which is nice..

also i’m going a little off personal posts, i kind of want this to evolve into a technical blog… sorry if that’s going to alienate a few people. i’ll still try and keep some insights into my life.

Owen

Today was the first team meeting we had since CITCON and the first team meeting we’ve been able to have as a full team for a long time (with lots of holidays been taken over the past month or two) as such i was very eager today to get into the nuts and bolts of stories and get them ironed out in a new fresh outlook i got from having some input from CITCON.

I wasn’t disapointed.

We spent most of the day on a single, pretty contentious story. It was a very black and white piece of functionality that added a lot to the application without taking a lot away, however after thinking about the meat and the meaning of the functionality i started to diverge from what we had planned for the story (with graphical mock ups of what the page would look like). Luckily i was allying with our main guru and methedology director. The argument raged all day, with our main developer coming in and complaining theat she couldn’t understand our agument. There were a number of moments that i was about to give up and given the lack of time available for the release (we’re down to 3 weeks) was about to say go for the original idea, well actually i had to admit i had given up and said just that, however we continued the argument and eventually everyone was approaching the story from the same direction and we agreed on a perfect solution. Unfortunately it’s not going to be finished in time for the next release, which i find really dissapointing.

Anyway the main point is i really enjoy being able to bash through a problem with my colleagues and arriving at a mutually agreeable solution as apposed to capitulating.

I don’t think i’m going to take well to any other way of working. I’m not sure what that means for me working in New Zealand but we’ll see.

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CITCON London was a great success and I enjoyed the event thoroughly, for the first time since starting as a Software Developer I managed to get myself outside of the bubble I work in and actually see how I “should” be doing things.

I really enjoyed the Open Spaces format and it allowed us to have a much more open discussion as everyone was acting like peers as opposed to a single person being at the head of the crowd after giving a keynote lecture. It really allowed us to communicate our ideas and talk about what we really wanted to talk about.

Having said that I came away thinking that I must be really stupid, knowing that we must be doing some things wrong, but still not so sure what those things were. Some people seemed very willing just to dismiss problems I expressed by just saying I was doing things wrong without explaining why I was doing things wrong.

Having said that the sessions were very insightfully and informative and came away thinking that I knew a lot more people in the community.

session Round Up:

Session 1:

What is a good/unit test, what is continuous integration, testing vocabulary.

This session, one of only 3 that ran in the 9am slot on the Saturday was really one of the more insightful of all, and my personal favourite. I had proposed a topic discussing what would be the bounds that everyone saw to a unit test no longer being a unit test, and a couple of other titles got tagged on too.

The outcome from this hour, apart from my descent into humbleness, was the idea that there are no unit tests/system tests/integration tests that matter, the names are nothing, what matters is we have two types of tests with differing priorities:

• Developer Tests:
  These tests are run regularly, generally before any code change is checked in, and should give an idea that the code runs well with other peoples code, that you haven’t broken anything. The main priority of these tests is Speed, when I make a change I am unlikely to want to run tests that run slowly and slow down my thought process and productivity so a slow test would quickly become a non-executed test and quickly become redundant.
• Customer Tests
  These tests are exactly what they say, can the software, does the software, do all the things the customer wants. These are by nature slower to run, and often mix automated tests (even in the domain language) with Manual Tests.

So we should not be banding around such verbose and technical terminology and instead focus on these two names for any test also sometimes a test can be in both sets. hmmmm

was quite surprised to see how many people didn’t use mocking frameworks but instead just hard coded mock objects…

Session 2:

End to End, where do the ends of testing lie?

This session saw a group of us discussing where do we control configuration management and where/how we prioritise tests. A discussion formed, mainly about how we should make sure that we mitigate and identify certain risk points in code, and a discussion of how the issues differed between in-house bespoke developers or product developers.

Session 3:

Getting the design benefits from testing.

This session was all about how modern coders/developers have taken on Test Driven Development and believed they were matching good design principals by default. However, there seems (from experience in the room) to be a lot of people who do not understand some basic principals of Object Orientated design..

I have to say I sat in this room and wrote “I am dumb” on a piece of paper to remind myself to go and brush up on my techniques, mainly because some of the terminology I just hadn’t heard… although since looking them up I actually found my coding practices generally follow them.

Session 4:

Low friction CI

This session was all about how to get a nice and easily configurable build that doesn’t use up all your time. I came away thinking that our build process is much to complex, and that I must look at speeding the whole thing up/striping the build down to it’s bare essentials. Something to do in the lead up to Christmas.

Session 5:

My brain was hurting so I decided to take a break here

Session 6:

FIT for fun and profit

I have to say I didn’t get a huge amount out of this session, mainly because I seemed to be one of only a couple of people using FIT in earnest on a project, so I took to the front and showed the others how we had FIT integrated into our build and had FITNESSE set up to control all our story tests. My demo was bad, mainly because I wasn’t expecting to do it, but hopefully next time there will be a couple more groups seeing the benefit from FIT.

technorati tags:CITCON, CITCONLONDON, Testing

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Well for a long time this site has been hosted on a MoveableType Content Management System, which was fine but a little bulky and i felt it was a little too hands on for my liking. as such i’ve moved the site to a shiny Drupal server, which allows me a few new toys… check out the External News, and integrated photo Gallery (ok so it’s got no pic in yet),

Also i’ve turned on enforced registering to make sure i don’t get any comment spam.

Hope you like the new lay out. although might take a little while to get used to.

So today I’m attending the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference (CITCON) here in sunny (yet cold) London.

The Conference started last night at 7pm, and I have to admit I was originally dreading what would be a Conference that would take away half my weekend (I had all these plans about sleeping etc). That said however I really enjoyed last night. There’s something about getting a room full of like minded geeks in a room and allow them to talk about what they want to talk about.

The Conference is run in a slightly different format to most, and the format bears a bit of talking about.

The format is something called an Open Space which allows the attendees of the conference to set the agenda, schedule and topics, an empowerment that’s maybe a bit daunting before I got to the conference itself.

So last night they got us all sitting in a room introducing ourselves, and discussing the topics that we wanted to talk about. I proposed a number of thorny topics I was ready to get my teeth into with my peers. Then I remembered that having proposed a topic title I was responsible for ‘facilitating’ that session (basically making sure there is something to talk about). So as the schedule stood last night I had a popular topic to facilitate first thing this morning (although the schedule is as fluid as the topics are, so it may not still be the case), hence why I’m able to put a post on the site at 7am on a Saturday.

Anyway I should make a move, I will update with some thoughts on the topics and people from the conference as soon as I have some time, and after all this I just want to say that I’m really looking forward to the day.

Just something i believe in:

Ok I’m finding myself falling asleep a
little at work, so I need to have a change of activity to keep my mind a little
bit active… so maybe a fresh post here might do the trick.

Well it’s been a bit of a hectic couple of
weeks with me so maybe I’ll start with some of the more important things to me

1. I’m not alone

Katy moved in on
the weekend, which is going to be great if not a little interesting on my part,
I’ve never had to intimately share my life with anyone before so this is going
to be a new experience, learning to keep things tidy and at least a little
clean, sharing cooking and cleaning with someone, actually having someone to
talk to most of the time. I realise how ever that this brings new challenges
too, we will both need space at times and I hope she has the foresight just to
say so when she does so I can go off and do my own thing too. Hopefully these
times won’t be too common, but who knows.

This might seem
to some to be quite hurried after only 5 months of a relationship, but fates
have conspired to this point. 2 of Katy’s previous flatmates had to move back
to the southern hemisphere, and as we are intending to live together in Wellington, I (we?) thought
that it might be good to get to see how it works here before we go.

1. I’ve been a Samaritan

Huw joined me
last week for a week of hands on practice at being an IT geek. He excelled and I
really hope that he gets a decent job off the back of it. For what it’s worth I
would definitely have him on any team I was on.

1. I’ve written this weblog entry

Done

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