Last night I facilitated our first Lean Coffee meetup at Agile Ottawa. Thanks again to all who made it out, and to You.i TV for the venue, food & drinks! :)

We covered a lot of interesting topics:

• How to sell executive sponsors on addressing technical debt?
• How to transition slow adopters from waterfall to agile when others have moved on?
• Wardley ( Read more... )

As you may know, last year we moved to Canada… I'd been threatening to for years, and finally got around to it ( Read more... )

So I've bitten the bullet and moved my mail into the cloud - in particular, Google's cloud: Google AppsFor several years, I've figured there wasn't much point in running my own mailserver anymore. Almost all hosting companies these days can provide the basics (smtp, imap, spam filtering, backups). All was going well until I was forced into it ( Read more... )

Nika and I had a great time at FOWA London 2008 this past week. Carsonified wanted to create a conference where people could learn, be inspired, and meet others... I think they succeeded on all 3!

If you missed the conference it's worth pointing out that the talks are being made available online! Highlights for me:

Networking
This is the main ( Read more... )

I've just released TAP-Formatter-HTML to CPAN:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/TAP-Formatter-HTML/

It's meant to make reading test results easier, giving you a visual summary of your test suite and letting you drill down into individual failures (which will hopefully make testing more likely to happen at your organization ;-).

It's based on Yuval ( Read more... )

I've been hacking on a GPX editor recently... it started off as a throwaway project to learn Catalyst, DBIx::Class & jQuery, but now it's starting to get close to usable I'm tempted to keep going with it...

If nothing else, I've certainly learned a lot. In addition to the above, it uses Geo::Gpx to do the GPX parsing, JSON to translate between JS ( Read more... )

Wow... I only just clocked that Google have finally released their commodity computing product - Google App Engine - yesterday. It'll be interesting to see how this competes with Amazon's EC2!

I really feel for smaller players like AppJet and Bungee Labs... the only way they'll be able to compete now will be by joining forces and creating open ( Read more... )

One of my friends pointed me to Tom White's Disks have become tapes post over the weekend... very cool idea - I remember coming across Hadoop several years ago in one of my searches of clustering technologies. I must admit, I don't think the simplicity (and moreover, the effectiveness) of MapReduce really clicked in my head back then. It ( Read more... )

Simon Wardley recently gave a talk at the Butler Group on innovation & commoditization of ITI've talked to Simon a number of times on the subject, and indeed, he's talked at a number of conferences on it. What I find particularly interesting about this one is his foray into the management of organizations. I quite like his S-curve visualization ( Read more... )

Wow... I didn't see this coming! (Unfortunately the original announcement wasn't loading for me). From an Open Source POV, it makes sense as Sun has long been a supporter of & contributor to OSS. It's just strange to see what I picture as essentially a hardware company buying a database company... And besides, if they had IPO'd I'd have ( Read more... )