Clowns In My Coffee

Here at RedHat’s campus, wating for the, uhh, keynote to begin. I’m (obviously) connected, Tom’s Mac is having troubles. Take that, Cupertino!

Intros. BarCamps explained, the guiding principle is informality and fluidty (wandering around the sessions is encouraged, etc.)

“Keynote” is over, people who want to propose a session are gathering to make their pitches.

The “scrum” is about to begin, where the sesions are going to shake out. I’ve got three I think I want to go to (APP, CI, and the busines of open source)

(ok, not liveblogging exactly because networking hasn’t been easy)

Morning sessions

learned a few things about how apps are delivered to mobile devices (aka “cellphones’), including testing (how do you do it with so many different clients out there?)

Seairth Jackson Jacobs (hope I remembered the name correctly) talked about RNA, RESTful Notification Architecture, which is a callback-based messaging protocol over HTTP. The basic idea is that participants in the conversation first exchange messages to eastablish URIs where further messages can be sent. The basic idea seems pretty solid, and one of the things it does is pass URIs to message contents instead of the message contents themselves. We spoke a little afterwards, I think this is promising.

Continuous integration: we spoke of CruiseControl and Continuum, and were walked through some basic demos. What more is there to say? Well, on my part this much, I guess.

Atom Publishing Protocol: the donuts of content management (is there anything it can’t do?) Whatever one may think of the wrinkles, it’s a well thought-through protocol.

The future of publishing: the general direction this one went in was that, at least with respect to books about the computer industry, getting a book published is going to look more and more like iterative development of software, with ‘beta releases’ put out there for public comment (the Pragmatic Bookshelf is already doing this).

Agile development: lots more here, with folks who are walking the walk trying to provide guidance. A lot of the time was focused on how you square agile software development with QA and requirements (which are, in a certain sense, what sandwich the traditional development cycle). Strategies for dealing with impedance mismatches between how the clients expect to generate requirements and what developers need to meet those requirements, and also between pervasive automated testing and the traditional role of software QA.

update:  if you’re wondering why there’s a trackback to Ryan Daigle’s “BarCampRDU reclamation project” from this post, it’s because this would be my collection of notes.