non-random ramble

I found that after an update, I was still seeing some entries lying around. Thanks to this issue on the intellij community forum I was able to simply remove the contents svn cache and it works.

~/Library/Caches/IntelliJIdea90/vcsCache

I find google reader a useful way to aggregate information from many blogs. Particularly convenient is to be able to read these on my iPhone and then mark them as shared. That way I can build up a list of information I am interested in.

This is then conveniently exposed as an RSS feed by google. You can see my shared items at http://www.google.co.uk/reader/shared/jim.barritt for example.

I used to have a sidebar on this site which had a snippet directly from google reader, but it was determined to have its own style. I wanted a wordpress plugin that would do it for me and found “Recommended Reading Google Reader” by C. Murray Consulting

Its the nice “READING” section on my sidebar. Thanks guys! You just saved me from writing my own!

I recently (Friday 14th May 2010) gave the closing Keynote at Agile North, a one day conference held up in Preston.

The talk was loosely based around a metaphor of mountain climbing and playing with the analogy of being a consultant on an agile project being like a mountain guide. The idea is that someone who is a mountain guide has many years of experience climbing and coaching people on the mountain.

The talk I think was well recieved and generated quite a bit of interest from people, I think because we were talking about real experiences on our current project.

I co-presented with Mark Crossfield who is the Tech Lead on the team I am Coaching at our current client, AutoTrader, and I felt it was an interesting balance between my “Guide” view and his experience leading a team into an Agile project for the first time.

We covered five short stories about our experiences on the project.

• Safety First – going beyond CI to pipelines
• The Walking Skeleton as a metaphor for iterative feature delivery
• Evolution of the codebase
• Collective Design
• Telling the story of the code

The Slide deck is up on slideshare and the talk can be viewed here.

At some point they promise to put up the video of the event at which point I will update this post.