log4p

Tonight I presented the Android platform at Finalists‘ quarterly tech meeting in Rotterdam. Tomorrow I’ll present it again in Eindhoven. I think the presentation went fairly well and attending colleagues managed to get a glimpse of the possibilities of the Android platform. Feel free to flip through the slides (I’m afraid I don’t have a video of the live demo’s):

Tonight I went to the CouchDB meetup in Amsterdam (‘In De Wildeman’) to discuss the architecture I’m designing for upcoming VPRO projects (more on that in a following blogpost). We had a really nice discussion about mostly the ‘edges’ of what CouchDB can do. Impressive numbers, that’s for sure! Big sites/companies are showing interest (craigslist, yahoo, myspace, facebook, BBC).
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I’m experimenting with some unconventional architectural ideas (at least from a Java developers view) while designing a new architecture for Dutch broadcaster VPRO. In this series of blogposts I’ll try to explain some of the concepts; please feel free to point out issues/caveats I failed to notice!
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QCon 2009 is no more. To bad, it was an really great conference. Today I mainly attended tracks aimed at how to be / become a good architect/teamlead and a really nice talk about the technical issue the twitter team faces (and solved).

Things I’ve learned (or heard again but think are important to keep mentioning) today:

• Stories are important, teams need a ‘Shaman’ who is capable of explaining why specific choices where made in the past
• Wise architects only need to have one answer to be capable of anwering any question: it depends…
• Architects and developers tend to try to solve problems in far to generic ways. Generic systems don’t tend to deliver the best end-user experience.
• 300 messages a second on twitter doesn’t sound like a lot. They are however send to a lot of followers!
• On the question of why twitter decided to built their own messaging queue instead of using an existing one (ie. JMS) they answered: well, our current solution is about 1200 lines of scala and perfeclty fits are needs. No other product could offer us that.
• Apache Camel and ActiveMQ are hot (a Dutch article I wrote on this should be published shortly)
• Simple solutions are often the best solution. HTTP is the most common example.
• Be very aware of the ‘here is a solution, what was the problem again’ approach.
• Having the get in your flight home while the conference is not over yet sorta sucks; well actually the stress on getting on the airplane in time isn’t really nice

All in all, QCon 2009 was probably the best conference I’ve ever visited. I’ve learned tons of really useful stuff. Not only from a technological point of view, but from a social point of view is well. It is delightful to hear how other people are solving or have solved the same problems as I am. I really hope to visit QCon 2009 next year as well!

I just returned from another great day of QCon. Today I focused on software architecture tracks. They where delightful.

Things I’ve learned (or heard again but think are important to keep mentioning) today:

• BBC has plans very similar to what I’m working on for Dutch broadcaster VPRO. A REST oriented service layer with lightweight widget/mashup rendering above and tools suited for the problem domain below. They are just a tiny bit further then we are at the moment.
• Guardian.co.uk built their application quite similar to the way I architected/developed cinema.nl apart from some details in caches. They are happy, but moving to REST oriented architecture to reduce coupling as well.
• Architects are falling from their towers and starting to use common-sense technology (like HTTP, RSS, ATOM, REST) more and more and are abandoning ‘enterprise’ patterns and tools (think JEE, Portals, SOAP etc).
• New architectures are often more about the social aspect then the technical aspect
• Clojure is definitely going on my short-list of ‘languages to look at’

Now, to see what the third day will bring!

Two days ago I traveled to London to visit this years QCon London conference. It has been great so far!

I’ve listened (and asked questions) to various interesting members of the community like C.A.R. Hoare (Computer Science, inventor of qsort), Martin Fowler (Ruby, Keynote), Ola Bini (Emerging languages), Kirk Pepperdine (Scalability), Cameron Purdy (Scalability), Jonas Bonér (Scala), Rich Hickey (Clojure) and more!

The smaller scale of QCon (as oposed to say JavaOne or Devoxx) and talks in an almost classroom like settings really work for me; you can actually get into a discussion with the speaker/audience instead of just being bombarded with tons of slides.

Things I’ve learned (or heard again but think are important) sofar:

• Scalability needs to be part of you architecture
• Think about graceful degrading when the unexpected happens
• You can actually do += on a val in scala: code snippet
• I really need to look at Clojure, although I think the code looks hideous
• Thoughtworks doesn’t seem to have strict guidelines in Ruby development but seems to do just fine without that
• Start a project with an experienced team, bring in the less skilled developers when the foundation is ready
• Some people have a really skewed view on using REST
• It’s really nice to have a twitter ‘backchannel’
• Guinness beer rocks

Now, to see what the second day will bring!