Continuously translating requirements into code in production fulfilling user expectations

This is a long phrase, but that is the term that I use when I refer to what I am doing as a developer through consultancy. Being a Senior Consultant, my workday consists of much more than just writing code. Although I like to refer to myself as a programmer, just coding won't do it. It is all about coding the right stuff. Avoid coding to much of the wrong stuff, and get the code into production as fast as possible. This is my mission, that is what i want to be good at.

Mary Poppendieck is talking about waste. Waste is pretty much anything that you do in your production line (aka project :-) that does not provide value for customers either directly or indirectly. I just came from a talk where she was talking about how to maximize throughout and how to reduce utilization. It is funny how many metrics not directly related to providing value for customers we have been measured against. It has been a long time since I have have been measured against how many lines of code I produce. Now we are measured using Story Points. This is better but in most cases, far from measuring the right thing. 
The right thing is value for end-users delivered in production, this is what we should measure, or, we should at least know when we provide it :-)

Nordås on domain-driven design

I must say, very nice introduction on Andres Nordås' talk on Doing Domain driven design better at JavaZone. He has really raised the bar with respect to getting someones attention to start with. Unfortunately It was no space left in Lab III for me and my co-worker. But now we are chilling out in the Overflow area, with really good audio and video so this is really great. Star Wars, get outa heeee....good work Anders.

Being able to provide infinite flexibility in the borderline between your domain and your infrastructure and to be more specific, repositories. When you want infinite flexibility, you also need to be sure that your coupling is loose so that you may adjust implementation strategies without afecting your domain, e.g what an order looks like or what it means to place an order.  
Being able to refer to a repository in form of a generic repository interface is a very nice thing. It is even better that use you generically typed interface without knowing if it is an in-memory repository, or a Hibernate reposiory. Dealing with persistent lifecycle is in concept trivial, you store/delete and retrieve objects by query or by id. This is how all interaction with repositories should be stated.

Anders presens several examples that shows how easy it is to achieve loose coupling using generic types a container and pluggable strategies. You should really take a look to see how our code may be improved. Eirik Maus and myself will touch briefly into the same topics in our talk on Dealing with one to too many relations in Hibernate. I beleive that if you are able to correctly model your repositories as Anders does, all the other bits and pieces will fall into place.

Talk about dynamic languages using Glassfish.

Just came from a talk of using dynamic languages in Glassfish. I would actually have expected some more in-depth information about practical appliances of dynamic languages, but the examples was pretty basic. I am really fond of the idea being able to pick the language of choice when confronted with a problem. If you are encountering a problem that would call for a functional language, pick Scala. If you want to leverage your existing investments in Rails-development, pick Ruby or Jruby. I don't thing that the strength of actually being able to do this cross-language is something that we are going to see much of. However, being able to use a hug range of languages in the same runtime is a very good thing. 

Bringing web into all this is a problem. The package and deploy-step is a mess, and one of the reasons why I am looking into actually moving away from java for web. War-files is a mess, deployment is a mess and app-servers and standards (and deviations of them) is a mess. Why cant we just get some mod_java stuff for Apache and just use apt-get to install it so we can get faster into production. This is where I want to go.

Javazone 2008.

It is finally time for doing JavaZone 2008 which I have been looking forward to quite some time. This year, I will try to go to as many hardcore presentations as possible. The reasons for that are pretty simple. Usually when I read articles and watch conference videos online, it is usually late in the evening after a long days work. My ability to dig into hardcore stuff is limited. Whereas, when I attend conferences, which I really enjoy, it something I can do fully rested, therefore I want to dive into technical stuff, closely related to what I do the most, programming.

The program this year looks OK, a good mix of technical and non-technical sessions. I think you will find something to your taste. What kind of sessions to you prefer yourself?.