The Ancient Art of Programming

In the next few months, I will be speaking at the following conferences:

• On the 13th and 14th of September, I will at JavaZone in Oslo.
• On the 24th of October, I will be speaking at The Enterprise SOA Conference in Antwerp. Hopefully, someone there can explain to me what SOA means ;-).
• On November 6th, I will be at the W-JAX 2006 in Munich,
and
• On December 7th-10th, I will be at the Spring Experience in Florida

That’s it for now, more to come!

As Alef mentions on his blog, the next Amsterdam Java meetup will be on September 29th, at 18:00 in De Jaren (Nieuwe Doelenstraat 20). It’s a great opportunity to meet fellow Java developers, and (most importantly) to consume large amounts of alcohol.

Hope to see you there!

On Wednesday afternoon at the Cortina Software Architecture Workshop, Erik “it depends” Dörnenburg started a session entitled Developer Productivity. We’re all looking for ways to increase the productivity, but what works and what doesn’t?

Frameworks

Everyone present at the session agreed that frameworks can offer a gain in productivity. A good framework allows one to focus on writing business logic, instead of writing plumbing code. This improves developer efficiency.

However, a bad framework can decrease productivity. If a framework does not offer the required functionality, every developer will create their own solution. If it forces a certain way of working which is impractical, workarounds will be created. Sometimes, developers are forced to use a framework, because it was developed by the project architect, or because it is part of the Infallible Reference Architecture. While a reference architecture can help less experienced developers; it can frustrate the more experienced.

In conclusion: a good framework helps you. If a framework does not help you, stop using it¹.

Capturing Abstractions and Intentions

If a tool can capture a set of concepts and build an abstraction over it, it can increase productivity. Also, productivity can increase if a tool can capture out your intentions, if it “knows what you want”.

An interesting example put forth in the session was that of GUI builders. GUIs mostly consist of labels with fields that are tied to variables. If the variable is a string, a edit box should be shown; if it is a boolean, a checkbox. One would imagine that GUI builders gain a lot by adding an abstraction which captures this combination. In practice, few GUI builders have it. Perhaps this isn’t such a great abstraction after all, and the Law of Leaky Abstractions applies here.

1 - Political and business decisions complicate things.

I have just returned from Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, where I attended the Software Architecture Workshop. The idea behind this workshop is basically to get a bunch of software architects/developers together in a room, and let them talk for an hour about stuff¹ in an environment in which ideas and opinions can circulate freely. This year’s edition was hosted by Andrea Provaglio, who did an excellent job.

It was an amazing experience. All attendees were extremely knowledgeable, smart, and interesting to talk (and listen) to. My head is still spinning from the experience, and it will take a few days to write up all of the notes I made. In addition, I made some interesting new friends there, who I hope to see again soon.

Paul has posted some nice pictures, which show that the surroundings were quite inspiring as well.

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Sometimes, my I21 coworker and friend Alef Arendsen has a very good idea. On Friday the 11th of November, he is organizing a get-together for Dutch Java developers. It will be held near Dam square, in a very authentic “jenever proeverij” (Wijnand Fockink).

I’ll be there: I’ll do anything for a free beer :-).