Speaking at the Choose Forum 2014

This Friday the annual Choose Forum will take place in Bern.

The Choose Forum is a small and lesser known conference that features highly interesting speakers each year.

I am very honored that I was invited to speak at the Forum this year along with Michael Feathers, Erik Doernenburg and Adam Tornhill.

My talk is titled “There is something about JavaScript”: 

This is the tale of an enterprise developer taking the adventurous journey into the realm of JavaScript. We will learn about all the dangerous pitfalls that lured on the way, but also about all the amazing encounters and beautiful discoveries that were waiting in on our protagonist.

I am looking forward to the event on Friday.

Weekend Reader, Week 46

.NET is Open Source

The big news of this week is of course Microsoft open-sourcing .NET:

Microsoft commits to making .NET cross-platform and to build a stronger ecosystem by adopting open source development. They will develop completely in the open and accept commits from the community.

The source for the next .NET is hosted on GitHub.
There will also a free full-featured edition of VisualStudio: Visual Studio Community 

What does change? Some predict the death of Java… but I don't think that much will change after a short hype: Enterprises that bet on the Microsoft Stack will still use Windows, I don’t think that .NET on Linux/Mac will be a relevant scenario in the enterprise any time soon. Since VisualStudio still only runs on Windows, mainstream .NET development will still happen on Windows.

.NET for Mac Desktop, iOS or Android development will remain a niche, as it its now with Xamarin.

I guess the one place where this move makes .NET a more attractive development platform are cloud scenarios: .NET becomes a more attractive platform, when there is no vendor lock-in to Azure.

 

LeSS: Scrum for the Enterprise

While there is a general disillusion about Scrum, the topic of scaling Scrum to the enterprise is still thriving… there must be money in that!

LeSS: Large Scale Scrum is the latest manifestation of "Enterprise Scrum” I have come across.

Welcome to the family of methodologies promising Agility to the enterprise:

• SAFe: Scaled Agile Framework
• DAD: Disciplined Agile Delivery
• Enterprise Scrum
• L.A.F.A.B.L.E: Large Agile Framework Appropriate for Big, Lumbering Enterprises

Personally I still don’t believe in scaling Agile to the Enterprise.

OH: “How big is that org? Small, medium, or dysfunctional?"

— Rob Myers (@agilecoach) November 11, 2014

 

Trust can scale

 if you replace trust with process, you’ll rip the heart right out of your company

Maybe instead of focusing on how to scale Agile to the Enterprise by introducing processes and ceremonies, we should remember what Agile is all about: Its about trust!

Hierarchical coordination fails when manager decisions depend on specialist knowledge:

 

Sacrifical Architecture

Often the best code you can write now is code you'll discard in a couple of years time.

Martin Fowler writes about the idea that maybe code is not meant to last. Throwing away code and rewrite applications might often be a good option. If we embrace this idea, then we should focus everything around the software delivery process to enable such rewrites efficiently. This is a radical change to the traditional approach of software creation.

 

How Google Works 

The only way for businesses to consistently succeed today is to attract smart creative employees. 

How Google Works from Eric Schmidt

I see a lot of parallels with the book "The New Kingmakers"

 

 

Deliberate Advice from an Accidental Career

Great story telling by Dan North, definitely worth the time.

Weekend Reader 45 - JavaScript

This weekend reader is purely focused on JavaScript.

It is long know that the JavaScript ecosystem is far from settled:

every javascript programmer I follow mentions at least five tools every day that I've never heard of before and never hear of again

— Gary Bernhardt (@garybernhardt) August 29, 2013

 

The last weeks were proving above trend in an impressive manner: The two major JavaScript frameworks AngularJS and EmberJS have announced their next versions.

 

Angular 2.0

At ng-europe the Angular team presented a first impression of the next version of Angular:

Almost nothing remains the same:

• No more controllers
• No more directive definition objects
• No more $scope
• No more angular modules
• AtScript: A new language on top of JavaScript

 

Here are some relevant links to get an overview of Angular 2.0:

• Angular 2.0 Core Presentation from ng-conf (video)
• Slides from above presentation
• Presentation about AtScript from ng-conf (video)
• Slides from above presentation
• All About Angular 2.0 from Rob Eisenberg

The changes are so striking that one could get the idea that the only thing remaining is actually the name of the framework.

The Angular 2.0 release is planned for end 2015/early 2016.

The reaction not only been positive:

Did Angular just commit suicide?

— Kevin Dente (@kevindente) October 29, 2014

I guess you guys aren't ready for Angular 2.0 yet…but your kids are gonna love it.

— I Am Devloper (@iamdevloper) October 30, 2014

 

And in the blogosphere: 

• Have the Angular Team lost their marbles? and discussion on redit
• Angular 2.0 announcement backfires
• “Screw You, Angular”

 

 

Ember 2.0

Also EmberJS, the “other” big JavaScript framework, announced its next version last week. However they chose quite another approach than the Angular team. Instead of surprising (shocking) the community with tons of changes, they establish a "RFC" (request for comments) process:

• Ember RFCs
• The Road to Ember 2.0 RFC

 

In contrast to AngularJS where the upgrade from 1.x to 2.0 will be a breaking change without a smooth transition, Ember aims for a smooth transition through a “steady flow of improvement”.

I am currently giving JavaScript and Angular Workshops to several companies here in Switzerland. Many big companies here are still trying to figure out how to integrate modern JavaScript frameworks in their development stack. Most of them are currently betting on AngularJS. Only very few of those companies are actually using AngularJS in production yet. I am curious what effect those recent announcements will have on the long term strategy of those companies.

 

React/Flux

Maybe there will be some traction to React/Flux. Here are some links to this “newcomer” in the space of frontend frameworks:

• The React framework
• The Flux Architecture 
• A nice Flux intro: Getting To Know Flux and Creating A Simple Shopping Cart with React.js and Flux

 

 

And if you don’t like big frameworks you can always use VanillaJS :-)

 

 

Java and JavaScript: A new romance

Java 8 contains Nashorn, a new JavaScript engine running on top of the JVM.

AdamBien held an interesting presentation at JavaOne showing the possibilities that open up with Nashorn:

 

Avatar 2.0

Oracle also presented Avatar 2.0 at JavaOne. Avatar.js is an attempt to bring the Node programming model and ecosystem to the Java platform. Project Avatar so far was an attempt to bcreate a JavaScript based platform (server and client side) on top of Java EE.
However the goal and purpose and the future of Project Avatar was unclear  during the last year.

Avatar 2.0 changes now quite a lot according to the blog post and presentation by Niko Köbler. The most significant change is certainly that it will run directly on the JVM without the need for a Java EE server.

Unfortunately there is no code or distribution available for Avatar 2.0 yet. I hope this will change soon ...

 

The Better Parts

The author of JavaScript: The Good Parts has revised a lot of his opinions since he wrote the book… talks by Douglas Crockford are always worth watching: