November 2007 – Lost in Colonisation

This last Saturday many ThoughtWorkers and I went to the ThoughtWorks Away day here in the UK. This is mainly so we can meet each other because not all of us work in the UK office. Throughout the day many talks were given by other ThoughtWorkers, relating lessons they learnt from projects. Here are the sessions I went to:

What kind of thing is it? Applying Domain Driven Design – Very interesting session. A different take on DDD from my current project. Some even diametric ideas such as no mock testing on EVA (entity, value objects, aggregates), which makes us think.
When do we have enough tests? – Another interesting one. Does test coverage actually provides business value, or are we chasing coverage for metric sake? Is this a question of quantity vs. quality? Are we compromising design for testability?
CI and Theory of Constraint – Probably the most pertinent session of the day. Great lessons on how Continuous Integration may actually make the project goes slower if it is the main bottleneck, and how to spot and remove them. Lots of audience participation and couple of us from my project took valuable lessons from it.
New features of C# 3.0 – Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Nothing I didn't know already. Mainly a session to try to get Ruby people to see C# is not as bad as they think 🙂
A Thought Experiment, projects without project managers – Promised to be controversial but turned out to be pretty boring. Might have something to do with the fact there were three PM in the room…
???? – A top-secret product demo that I can't talk about. I've already seen some of it when I was in Bangalore so it wasn't as exciting as I thought. Should have gone to the meta-programming with Ruby session instead.

It won't be a TW event without our esteem leader and troublemaker, Roy, to give us a speech. Many achievement were mentioned. Plenty under NDA but here is one that we can brag about publicly:

Oracle Mix (http://mix.oracle.com) – Launched this week at Oracle World. Built by TW in 5 weeks with 4 TWers and 2 Oracle people using JRuby running on Oracle stack. "Impressive!" as Yoda said! And if you scroll to the bottom and look to the right, you will see something that normally doesn't appear from our work with clients.

And we play as hard as we work so in the chilling out room, some of us play Jenga Tower.