I spent two days recently enjoying being in Cornwall attending and presenting at the first Cornish agile conference .
The event was a great success with world class speakers (you can see the on the website), and an actual beach party on the thursday night with a band () and hogroast. The organisation was also superb, co-ordinated by . From the attendee perspective, It was great to meet and talk to such a good turn out of passionate developers and companies.
I have some involvement in the genesis of the event. My dad, is working for a company called who are helping companies in cornwall to develop and grow. At some point a while ago, I had connected him with and suggested that a good way to help everyone get into agile was to host a conference. A year or so later, and I found myself down in cornwall amongst some of the people I have massive respect for in the industry. The event has also had a great sponsorship and support from , which makes me really appreciate what an amazing company it is to work for.
Some highlights for me were hearing talking about Lean Startup and running a value stream mapping workshop, reminding us all that software should be FUN, and firing us up to keep our focus on quality codemanship and staying out of the “Anaerobic” zone when developing code. It was also great to see everyone getting down to the code in a dojo with , to have the fantastic helping people with common agile adoption problems, and have talking about TDD. Quite a line-up!
Unfortunately I couldn’t attend my colleague talk as we were speaking at the same time, but I have seen the slides and it sounded awesome, so I hope to catch it another day. Parallell to us was so I missed his talk too, but it sounded like he had a good time.
I managed to make a presentation myself, talking through some of the experiences I have had as a consultant working for ThoughtWorks, and in particular some developer practices. I over estimated the amount of material I was trying to get through but did manage to get to a few key points! For those who attended a couple of interesting jump points to follow up might be , (the tool at the end), and by .
All in all, the event was a great time and I hope that it signifies the beginnings of putting cornwall on the world stage for software development and high tech companies!
I just tried to install mono version 2 from darwin ports.
Before starting i uninstalled the mono i had already:
#!/bin/sh -x
#This script removes Mono from an OS X System. It must be run as root
rm -r /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework
rm -r /Library/Receipts/MonoFramework-SVN.pkg
cd /usr/bin
for i in `ls -al | grep Mono | awk '{print $9}'`; do
rm ${i}
done
First i could search for the mono package by typing
$ port search mono
To begin with this did not show the right version so i did :
$ port selfupdate
This checks for a new version of port and updates its list of available software.
now i see:
coco:~ Jim$ port search mono
mono devel/mono 2.0 Implementation of the .NET Development Framework
mono-addins devel/mono-addins 0.3 Mono.Addins is a framework for creating extensible applications
monodoc devel/monodoc 2.0 Documentation for the Mono .NET Development Framework
monotone devel/monotone 0.41 A distributed version control system
mod_mono www/mod_mono 1.1.16.1 an Apache plug-in for hosting the Mono System.Web classes
coco:~ Jim$
so all good, i ran
port install mono
but get :
darwin_stop_world.c:307: error: 'ppc_thread_state_t' has no member named '__r31'
make[3]: *** [darwin_stop_world.lo] Error 1
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2
A quick search on google brought this:
The instructions here talk about editing this darwin_stop_world.c file and changing some constant values. They give the path to the file for an older version but a bit of ls ing turned up the new folder:
The instructions in the above link talk about some constants not set up correctly. On the line wher ei saw my exception, it was referring to the following bit of code:
Watch out for the top of stack one! its an extra one.
ok this works!
I had to restart the terminal because it didnt seem to find the new programs – it still thought mcs lived in /usr/bin not /opt/local/bin which is where port puts it.
Now i can compile c# version 3.0!!
oh yeah, be sure to use gmcs to compile, not mcs which is the old one.
At the end of our last couple of retrospectives, we ended up with a set of actions that were really for the whole team to think about. Actually they were more like principles we should be following for the next iteration, rather than specific tasks.
Whilst retrospectives should really come out with very specific achievable and measurable actions, these more general themes can also be useful.
One of the team, Jeremy started writing the basics of the actions on cards as statements, like “Challenge Requirements”. We put these “mantras” on the wall and so we can see them and sometimes refer to them during standups.
This Iteration we did the same thing and it seemed to be a good way of capturing and making visible a result of our retrospective.
So far we have :
Challenge requirements
Understand Story Intention
Challenge the spike
Its not over until UAT (User acceptance testing or signoff)
Keep stories focused and SIMPLE
Migration code will ALWAYS be used again
Transfer ownership (of stories, if people leave or move teams)
Abstract: Software development implicitly creates a software “design”, the shape of the software artifact. To build software requires people. This talk discusses how the design of software is affected by and communicated between software developers, particularly on projects involving many people.
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