As I mentioned in a previous post, last week I attended to the Eclipse Banking Day in London. It was an enriching experience for me, not only in terms of speaking in a foreign language in front of large crowd but also seeing what other financial institutions are doing with Eclipse. I also met great people, during and after the event, so, who could ask for more? It was a really great event!

Most of the presentations are now available on the event wiki page. I encourage you to take a look to some of them. Anyway, here there are some few personal thoughts about the presentations:

• Mike Milinkovich shared with us the Eclipse Foundation vision towards collaborative software development of tomorrow. He explained that in 3 years banks will collaborate on a common platform, where Eclipse could play a key role, and therefore banks will be able to focus all of their possible energies on what really provides them a competitive differentiation. I really wish it happens, but even though we have started seeing some proposals/incubators projects, like Financial Platform or Open Financial Market Platform, I believe we will spend a few more years before it becomes mainstream. Hopefully I’m wrong!
• It was also great to share a picture slide with Mike. The maturity model for OSS adoption is a great indicator of OSS engagement, not just for ISV’s but also for enterprises.
• Mike also introduced e4, the next generation of Eclipse, and its 3 key architecturals goals: Eclipse platform as services, modeled and declarative UI, and SWT for the web. Related to the last one, have you ever wondered how the Eclipse IDE could look like if it was a browser-based? well, then take a look at this post. Sounds interesting, isn’t it?
• Neil Bartlett did a great talk about OSGI. I liked the Stackless Stack reference.
• Damm, I missed Tas Frangoullides’s presentation about MDD and SOA at Barclays. For what I have seen on the slides, it sounds like a really interesting initiative.
• Miles Daffin, from Morgan Stanley, talked about provisioning in a large environment and some really strong installation policies. This is a great topic, because most of the big enterprises share the same requirements from the IT security guys, albeit we usually don’t discuss them in public: no downloads from Internet, no unapproved software installations, … So Miles’s talk about how they solved these requirements was really worth. And I totally agree him regarding provisioning: “Eclipse is not designed with enterprise users in mind”. So … lots of work for the P2 folks!
• Jeremy Nelson explained J.P. Morgan’s OneBench platform for trading applications based on Eclipse RCP. It was really great, but … wish he had included some pictures about the platfom.
• Sven Efftinge‘s presentation was about DSL frameworks and tools. He introduced the Eclipse modelling stack and he showed a real external DSL implementation using TMF Xtext and GMF. There are few DSL real examples that becomes public, so it is always a pleasure when someone explains one of them in a event. These guys from itemis are doing an incredible job.
• And the last one, Ferran Rodenas talked about la Caixa’s software factory approach using Domain Specific Modeling Languages. His talk was … well, we could summarize it as he did what he could!

And that’s all folks. Any other attendees would like to share their thoughts?

After the success of the Eclipse Banking Days in Frankfurt and New York, the Eclipse Foundation hast just announced the Eclipse Banking Day in London on February 12, 2009.

Eclipse Banking Day is a day-long event for senior technical developers, architects and managers in the finance industry to learn how to better leverage Eclipse technology and the Eclipse community as part of their development strategy. The event will focus on three themes:

1. Eclipse as a platform for application development;
2. Leveraging Eclipse modeling technology for data exchange; and
3. Collaborating with the open source community.

Attendees will have the chance to hear speakers from leading financial institutions and experts from the Eclipse community.

It is not a secret that Eclipse is being used by some of the major banks and financial institutions around the world. Well, as it could not be less, we are also using Eclipse, both as a tools integration platform and as a branch teller workplace. Some days ago, Ian Skerrett (Eclipse Marketing Director) asked me if we would be interested in sharing our experience with other banks. So … we decided to accept the invitation and I’m going to present at the Eclipse Banking Day in London how we are using Eclipse at “la Caixa“. Despite the below pompous abstract, I think it will be an interesting presentation.

Repository Based Application Development Environment for Banking Systems

“la Caixa” is currently the leading savings bank in Spain and the third largest financial entity in the country. With a large network of more than 5.500 offices, more than 8.100 automatic cashpoint machines, a staff of more than 26.000 employees and more than 10,5 million clients, ”la Caixa” has positioned itself as a leading entity and referent within the Spanish financial sector.

In this talk, we will explain how “la Caixa” is using Eclipse to create a repository-based application development environment that successfully empowers its +1000 developers to create first-class custom enterprise banking applications in a fast-changing market. We will take a brief tour of “la Caixa”‘s enterprise architecture and we will take an inside look at some custom Eclipse plugins built at “la Caixa”. We will describe how using a collaborative environment, visual designers and code generators “la Caixa” allows its developers to create rapidly all the software components, from web UI to IMS-PLI-DB2 transactions, but also archiving software reuse across the whole organization and enforcing governance in an unobtrusive way.

This presentation will also explain briefly how “la Caixa”‘s 24.000 tellers are using Eclipse as a branch teller workplace. We will describe “la Caixa” bank teller evolution, and how using Eclipse it is possible to integrate in a common workplace from a custom legacy UI render to a modern web UI.

If you are interested in attending, you need to pre-register (early, space is limited!). There is no cost to register but you must work for the financial services industry.

Hope to see and meet great Eclipse enthusiasts there! I will try to share my thoughts on the conference after the event.

Don’t miss the No Silver Bullet Reloaded Retrospective OOPSLA Panel Summary post by InfoQ. It’s a worth read. Great panelists and great content.

Some statements that I’ve found interesting:

Dave Parnas:

Desire for people to seek better tools rather than “actually learning the trade.” Dave used the metaphor: “there is an old saying: ‘the poor workman blames his tools’ – people are poor workmen, I think most programmers are poor workmen.” Dave also said that people are looking for silver bullets to avoid learning the trade.

Linda Northrop:

We still need great designers, and I think we still have far too few, and we still need to cultivate an atmosphere of hard work but also an inner-disciplinary perspective that takes us uncomfortably out of our coding world.

Dave Thomas:

He called today’s state of the art in software development (especially middleware) a gratuitous disaster due to overly quick fast pace of change in API’s and frameworks which create immature software and also create too much difficulty for average software teams to track and stay up to date with. Dave claimed that the majority of today’s enterprise systems are basically just CRUD applications: “In the end these people are trying to do things that are fairly straight forward, and if they were working on a mainframe using a 4GL, they would actually have the thing done.“

He has seen “real successes” in niches, citing highly specialized domain-specific and specialized language applications in airlines reservations and hedge funds;

Martin “Werewolf” Fowler:

You can’t measure your output, you can’t measure your productivity, no way you can run sensible experiments to figure out whether one technique is better than another. …

The biggest difficulty in software development is the communication between the people writing the software and the people for who the software is being written. The conceptual attacks, the essence problems, focus a great deal on trying to improve that communication. The trouble of doing that, of course, is that it’s hard to get that communication flowing. Some of the business people don’t want to talk with software people, and fortunately the software people are hopeless when it comes to social interaction, they can’t talk to business people.

You seem to think that with hardly any information at the beginning of the project you can map out exactly what’s going to happen, pin down costs, commit yourselves to all sorts of unrealistic plans. And then you wonder why it is that I always manage to turn up. That illusion of control, the idea that on basis of hardly any data you can let make these grand predictions, that very folly is one of my greatest strengths.

Fred Brooks:

I know of no field of engineering where people do less study of each other’s work, where they do less study of precedents, where they do less study of classical models. I think that that is a very dangerous thing.

After almost a month since RSDC 2008, there is not much more to add to what already has appeared in the press. Mike MacDonagh, from Ivar Jacobson International, has also wrote a great post covering all the 22 20 9+11 product announcements and some specific posts covering in detail RQM and RRC. And Coté, from Redmonk, has published some nice video interviews. So … nothing more to add … except some silly thoughts, some photos of the playful part of the event and some curious facts I discovered just for the record.

Thoughts:

Good news: The Jazz Platform is here! Bad news: The Jazz Platform is here!

Jazz is the next generation platform for Rational products, which goal is to be for collaboration tools what Eclipse is for the desktop. With this platform, there will be a better integration between tools and, most important, a better integration in the application lifecycle. For those of us who started our career using or developing CASE tools, this concept is not new (BTW, I was introduced to this world using Softlab Maestro II). But after the failure of traditional CASE tools, only a few vendors continued to develop integrated solutions for the entire application lifecycle. Now it seems that Rational is changing its strategy and is going to embrace ALM 2.0, and this represents good news for Rational customers.

But I also think that hard times are coming for existing Rational customers. The Jazz Platform will change most of the Rational portfolio, so expect a new wave of product releases based on Jazz in the next few years (I heard something about a 10 years plan, but I can not confirm this). During the conference, I talked with several customers and I appreciate lots of excitement on them but also some worries, mainly because nowadays there are some not answered questions about which will be the future of some products (same issue for Telelogic customers). For some large IT shops with huge investment in Rational products the transition could be traumatic, specially if Rational doesn’t plan very well the roadmap.

About open-sourcing Jazz, now it is clear to me that the Jazz core infrastructure is not going to be released as an open source project, at least in a short-medium term. There have been some inaccuracies in the press, partly fueled by some statements at the RSDC 2006. At this point, I want to thank Dave Thomson, from whom I learned a lot and who kindly discussed with me (without any complaint) about OCD and open source in 3 different occasions. I think I earned the “terrible pain” title.

Instead, they announced the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration initiative, an integration architecture for tools and software development processes. Quoting directly from the Open Services FAQ: “Our goal is to enable teams to use disparate tools and share lifecycle resources in delivering software, whether the tools are from IBM, other vendors, open source projects, or in-house development. We aim to do so in a way that is open and non-proprietary and that will encourage all industry members to participate“. Ummm, I’m sure I’ve heard this statement in the past, and it is not a Déjà vu. Luckily, Martin Nally, CTO of Rational, clarified this statement telling us that this is not an AD/Cycle resurgence. But I’m not really sure, for me it’s the same concept as AD/Cycle but out of the mainframe, without a central repository / data model and using some modern protocols aimed to break the usual vendor silos. Let’s see if this time the effort will reach the necessary consensus. And talking about Open Services, I also want to thank two really brilliant guys, Pat Mueller and Simon Johnston. They explained me in detail JRS, the embryo for Open Services.

Related to the Jazz development process, Bill Higgins was kindly pleasant to introduce me most of the Jazz team leads, some of them I follow on twitter. What I discovered talking with them is that there is lots of innovation and experimentation in the Jazz development process. BTW, Bill and Erich Gamma also suffered stoically my not so innovative presentation about my company and which are our plans for the application development tools.

And finally, I also want to mention Mainsoft, one of the Rational business partners. Philippe and Jenna spent some time with me introducing a great Microsoft SPS Jazz integration. Thanks for your time! As I told to Danielle, it was really interesting.

Special events:

On Monday, there was the Telelogic Welcome Celebration event, featuring The Wallflowers. To be honest, it was the first time I heard about this band. They sound great, but definitively it’s not my preferred music style. Anyway, I listen to the concert next to Kelly, so it was a very enjoyable evening.

The Wallflowers, originally uploaded by Ferran Rodenas.

On Wednesday, there was the Universal Studios special event. I found the Fear Factor Live show really disgusting, but the Revenge of the Mummy was really funny. And quoting Mitch Fatel, here it is how Telelogic was acquired by IBM/Rational shark:

Universal Studios – Jaws, originally uploaded by Ferran Rodenas.

And finally, some curious facts that I discovered during the conference:

• Orlando is really hot, but inside hotels you could freeze to death, they are really really cold. This is something I’ve observed in several US conferences.
• Smoker’s corner and Dolphin Bar are great places to meet new friends. Bad habits that helps to socialize you.
• Despite the general belief in this part of the pond, US people love Europe. I talked to several people that knows very well Spain, and someone asked me about tourist routes by bike in the south of Spain.
• Boston and Canadian accent is easier to understand than North Carolina accent. Sorry guys, but I had to pay close attention in order to understand you!
• When you spend all the day listening and speaking a language which you are not very fluent in, you usually finish the day with a big headache. Anyway, this time I felt myself more fluent than in previous occasions, and I believe Twitter has something to do.
• Dolphin fountain is not only aimed for decoration purposes. You can swim on it. I saw more than 10 people inside!

dolphin fountain, originally uploaded by kellypuffs.

Definitively, it was a great experience! Hope to be there next year.

Exhausted after my first day at RSDC, so just a quick note.

Yesterday, my flight from JFK to MCO was delayed 3 hours and I arrived to Orlando too late. As I had a meeting earlier this morning, I haven’t slept much last night. Anyway, this morning I felt energized. I finally met Kelly and some of the Jazz guys, Bill and Patrick, in our first Blogger/Tweetup at the Dolphin Bar. And I got my very exclusive Rational Suport Moo Card!

Oh, and if you hear some rumors that I’m appearing at the WebSphere Rocks! cover magazine dressed like a guitar hero, it’s not true! Forget it!

Just a couple of days left before I flight to Orlando for RSDC’08 (IBM Rational Software Development Conference).

Two years ago I attended to this conference as a non-customer, and I was thoroughly impressed. It is always great to hear real customer case studies and to talk to other peers who share the same passion about application development tools. However, this year I am going to attend as a customer. The main difference is that as a customer you can meet some IBM/Rational key figures (and I am not referring to the R-Heroes) and attend to some reserved events. For example, this year I have scheduled some meetings with some Rational PM’s and another one with our Lab Advocate. And I have also been invited to the VoiCE event, where they are going to explain us future products (unfortunately under NDA) and where we can vent all our anger, for example, about how complicated and heavy are some of their tools. Let’s see how great the conference would be this time.

This year I am also specially excited, as I am going to meet some virtual “friends” in real life. People like Bill or Patrick, with whom I have interacted via email, chat, blogs or Twitter. And of course, Kelly, the only one, who after all these years of online interactions she deserves lots of big hugs and kisses (and not only because she set aside for me a VERY limited Rational Support Moo card). And ssshhh, keep a secret, we have both started to set up an open Twitter and Blog meetup at the Disney’s Swan bar, so stay tunned!

If you are going and you are reading this post, shoot me an e-mail at frodenas [at] gmail [dot] com or comment this post. We can swap contact info and figure out how to meet up. If you are not attending and you are interested in knowing what happens during the conference, just follow the #rsdc hastag or search for the rsdc2008 tag.

Last month I attended the QCon London 2008 conference, one of the best conferences about software development. I’ve been very busy after the conference and I didn’t had time to write my thoughts about some of the sessions I attended until now. In the meantime, InfoQ, one of the organizers, has published a worth read post with some views and perspectives of other attendees who blogged about this conference. Anyway, here they are my notes:

How Eclipse changed my views on Software Development – Erich Gamma

Erich started his keynote explaining the Eclipse evolution, from its inception in 2000 as a closed project, the reaction from the development team when IBM decided to release the code in 2002, the success of the transparency model, to the design of the Jazz Project in 2006 as a team collaboration platform to integrate all the best practices learned during the years of the Eclipse development.

He talked about how transparency and accountability added an incremental value to Eclipse, and how it’s related to the Open Commercial Development style, an hybrid development model that takes aspects of both the open and proprietary development models, something that IBM is applying to the Jazz Project and to Project Zero. He said that OCD is more than publishing the source code, it is an open, transparent process, from feature requests and planning through delivery. BTW, this model is very criticized outside IBM due to some misconceptions (developers works for IBM for free).

He described some best practices applied during the Eclipse development, summarized as “It is about being continuous: Continuous iterative and adaptive planning, continuous design/refactoring, continuous integration/testing, continuous delivering/demos, continuous feedback, continuous learning”. It’s what they call the “Eclipse Way”, some practices from all kinds of sources (Scrum, RUP, …) underpinned with values (for example, ship quality on time). But he also said there were some pain points, specially with some boring and painful tasks, and the lack of a integrated tool set.

Then, he explained the Jazz Project, which goal is to be a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for seamlessly integrating tasks across the software lifecycle, and he finally did a demo about Rational Team Concert, the first product based on Jazz, and asked us to try it by ourselves at the Jazz.net site.

Amazon Services: Building blocks for true Internet applications – Jeff Barr

Jeff, Amazon’s senior web services evangelist, summarized in this session the different services offered by Amazon focused on Cloud Computing. He explained which are today challenges for a company that operates globally: data centers, bandwidth, operations and scaling. Then, he explained in detail the utility computing services available to users:

• Amazon Simple Storage Server (S3): data storage
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): virtualized processing capacity
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS): inter-process messages
• Amazon SimpleDB (SBD): distributed data storage

He also said that, unlike what many people think, most users who use their services are large companies. He gave the example that many of the Fortune 500 companies use Amazon’s infrastructure services to run their development environments.

Keeping 99.95% up time on 400+ key systems at Merrill – Iain Mortimer

Despite the session title, Iain, Chief Architect at Merill Lynch, talked about how Merrill monitored their systems (about 344 tier 0 & 1 globally disperse servers). Two interesting notes:

• They implemented their own technology, as none of the vendors was able to guarantee a 99,95% SLA (eat their own dog food).
• They monitor 9 billion messages a day.

Born to Cycle? An Agile Approach to Working – Linda Rising

Funny session, with lots of participation and a great discussion.

Basically, Linda explained that humans are not designed to be linear, instead we act by pulses: we move between energy consumption and the renewal of the energy consumed. Therefore, we must be able to manage our energy, not our time (see the article “Manage your energy, not your time“, Tony Schwartz, HBR, October 2007). If we can find a balance by establishing a regular rhythm of work and rest, then we will have a higher productivity in a more sustained way. She gave the example of setting four 90-minutes sprints (like the REM sleep cycles) a day, where, in each sprint, we have to concentrate on the work to be done without allowing interruptions, and then rest for 20 to 30 minutes. Anyway, everyone must find his own cycle.

She also explained that if you switch your attention from a primary task to a secondary one, then the time it takes increases 25%. The audience answered explaining that this was a nice statement, but hard to be done. What must we do with email, phone calls or IM interruptions? This question resulted to a funny discussion about a study stating that CNN or BBC tickers reduces IQ by 10%, and someone replied saying that smoking marijuana only reduces IQ by 5%. Session conclusion: is better to smoke marijuana than to watch CNN!

REST: A Pragmatic Introduction to the Web’s Architecture – Stefan Tilkov

Stefan did a great introduction to REST. First, he explained that there are 3 different definitions for SOA:

• An approach to business/IT alignment: driven by business instead of technology, relying on strong governance and implemented using any technology.
• A technical architecture: service oriented with clearly defined interfaces, and could be technology-independent.
• Web Services: business data as XML messages implemented using WS-* stack.

Then, he explained 3 different definitions for REST:

• An architectural style (the right one): what appears in the Roy Fielding’s doctoral dissertation.
• The web used correctly (aka WOA or ROA): to use HTTP, URI and other Web standards “correctly”.
• XML without SOAP: send plain XML via HTTP violating the Web as much as WS-* stack.

After this introduction, he explained the basic principles of REST with some nice examples. He finally stated that there isn’t any REST vs SOA war, it is REST for SOA. There are two visions for SOA, to use REST or to use WS-*. The difference is on the technical layer and on their roots:

WS-* roots = The Enterprise: “A gigantic, uncontrollable anarchy of heterogeneous systems with varying quality
that evolve independently and constantly get connected in new and unexpected ways.”

REST roots = The Internet : “A worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP).”

If you are interested in this presentation, Stefan has put the slides in his blog.

The Cathedral, the Bazaar and the Commissar: The Evolution of Innovation in Enterprise Java – Rod Johnson

In this session, Rod started citing some sources of innovation: creativity, experimentation, competition and economic motivations. Then, he detailed the J2EE evolution linking with the innovation factors before commented, with particular emphasis on how the standards established by the JCP resulted on the decline of J2EE.

He compared the JCP with two development models: the Cathedral model, software built by relatively few people, with centralized design; and the Bazaar model, many developers, especially linked to Open Source, who lay out their wares. He stated that neither model is a complete solution: the bazaar model encourages competition but may not produce innovation, and the cathedral model is more likely to produce innovation but doesn’t produce competition. He finally said that JCP acts like a politburo commissar (they know what’s best for the developers), creating excessive standards and ignoring existing technologies. Something that it’s actually evolving but that should change much more and much faster if they want to survive.

eBay’s Architectural Principles – Randy Shoup

Randy, eBay Distinguished Architect, talked about 4 architectural strategies they use at eBay:

• Partition Everything:
  • Split every problem into manageable chunks. eBay uses 2 partitioning patterns: segment databases into functional areas and split databases horizontally.
  • No database transactions (lot of buzz from last year session by Dan Pritchett). Developers must careful order DB operations. And remember: consistency is not always required or possible.
  • No session state, so user session can move through multiple application pools. Transient state is maintained by URL, cookies or scratch databases.
• Async Everywhere: use asynchronous processing as much as possible, applying message dispatch or periodic batch patterns.
• Automate Everything: it is better to use automated systems to manual systems. Example: automated tool executes staged roll out, with built-in checkpoints and immediate rollback if necessary.
• Remember Everything Fails: assume every operation will fail and every resource will be unavailable, so build all systems to be tolerant of failure. eBay enforces that every change must have a rollback plan, because they roll out their entire site every 2 weeks (16,000 application servers in 220 pools).

Functions + Messages + Concurrency = Erlang – Joe Armstrong

Great fun with Joe’s session, the inventor of the Erlang programming language. He satirized about the reasons that a 25 years old language like Erlang is scheduled in the “Programming Languages of tomorrow” track. He told us that Erlang was created by accident, due to the strong requirements from the telecomm industries (severe penalties if the system is unavailable for more than 4 minutes per year).

He explained that functional language is not the most important characteristic of Erlang. What really matters is concurrency and distribution oriented. He gave the example that Moore’s law is reaching its limit, and how after a 52% power increase in each new CPU architecture prior to 2002, now we are seeing increases of only 20%. He explained that computer architectures are evolving towards: multicore (without success, because applications are still running on a single CPU), cell computers (hard to program) and network on chip (NOC). He also discussed the significant decrease of new CPU’s power consumption: 850 KW for 1 Tflop in 1997 to 24W for 1 Tflop in 2007.

After that, he explained the Erlang’s excellences to run on multicore systems, essentially using the Actor Model paradigm, and the ability to be a fault tolerance language. Finally, he said that every year we will see how sequential programs will be increasingly slower, and for that reason, it is important to be prepared for concurrent-oriented languages.

This year I’m going to miss the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2007, but … only in real life, because for the first time, RSDC will also take place in Second Life.

Check these SL URLs from June 10th to view the General Sessions, catch Rational product demonstrations, and interact with Rational experts: IBM 5 Main Tent and IBM CodeStation.

And of course, if you want to know how is the real atmosphere at RDSC, Kelly Drahzal will be live blogging this event.

A bit late, I know, but here it is the second part of the summary (1st and 2nd day):

“Modifiability: Or is there Design in Agility?“: Martin Fowler lead some ThoughtWorks architects through a discussion of design in an agile context. He started talking about a misconception: “Agility means to start coding directly, without designing”. So he remarked that it’s very important to start designing at the beginning of the project, although it can be modified during the rest of the project. He also stated that simple doesn’t mean stupid, simple means that it’s simple to use and it has sense.

“Operational Manageability“: Dan Pritchett (eBay Technical Fellow) talked about designing for operations and how operational scalability is a software problem. He point out some recommendations about managing configuration in a large enterprise, deploying without taking down the site and avoiding SPOF. He also presented a fact: “Power and cooling are now the primary constraint to growth”, a fallacy: “Hardware will provide the performance improvements needed to keep pace with transaction growth”, and a reality: Inefficient software has driven datacenters to the brink of municipal power delivery capabilities”. He recommends trying to measure power efficiency using (and improving) metrics as for example page views per second / Watts. Dan has also a great post about scaling where he mentions all of the vectors you must consider.

“Test Driven Development: How do we know we’re done?“: Steve Freeman presented this introductory session about TDD. He started with some basic cyclical examples: implementing a test just enough to pass and then Refactor! He said TDD is a design technique and we must test the features not the methods. He also said that unit test code could be half of the source code.

“Agile Project Management: Lessons learned at Google“: Jeff Sutherland started comparing The Toyota way and the Agile Principles, and then the Google way. After that, he described how the Adwords project leader introduced Scrum into Google (an environment that does not have an affinity to processes in general). He talked about some problems that they have found (resistance, late deliveries, …) and how Google reinvented some Lean practices (work in progress). He concluded saying that “[Google] teams embraced the process enough to continue it even without any reinforcement”. At this Google Tech Talk, you will find Jeff explaining the same presentation that he showed at Qcon.

And finally, infoQ has posted a great article where they present the main takeway points and lessons learned by attendees who blogged about QCon.

Finally I found some time to write about the QCon 2007 conference held last week in London. I think it was a great conference. As usual, there were some poor sessions (I had high expectations about some speakers and contents), but there were also some interesting ones.

So, here it is the first part of the summary (3rd day):

“The eBay Architecture – Striking a balance between site stability, feature velocity, performance and cost“: Dan Pritchett (eBay Technical Fellow) talked about some interesting eBay’s architecture features, as how they deal with vertical DB segmentation (by functional areas) and horizontal DB splits (date, location, …), and, how they don’t use stored procedures, triggers and, amazing, nor transactions (Martin Fowler is talking about this in his post Transactionless). This means that all business logic is executed by the application (sorts, joins, referential integrity, …). They use intensively prepared statements an bind variables (cached by datasources). They also scales using a rewritten connection pool and an internally developed ORM solution called DAL (Data Access Layer). All CRUD operations are executed through this infrastructure. If you are interested in reading the full presentation, Dan has posted it (PDF) at his site.

“Developing Expertise: Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep“: Dave Thomas (The Pragmatic Programmers), started his speech asserting that process improvement requieres PEOPLE improvement (he recommends to read Capers Jones assessments and benchmarks). Using the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition, he described, on a funny way, the characteristics of people on different stages (Novice, Advanced beginner, Competent, Proficient, Expert). He stated that the vast majority of developers are on Stage 2, and we need to raise the bar. He advocates to use Dreyfus to fix companies and to fix our careers, and also, learn and apply financial management to our daily work (have a plan, diversify, look for value, be active, …).

I have also uploaded some photos to Flickr, although you will find more photos, including my photos, at the QCon 2007 Group Photo Pool.