slides and source for answer set programming session at spa 2013

Monday, June 24th, 2013

Marina de Vos and I ran a session on answer set programming at the SPA 2013 conference.

Download the code and the slides
Download just the slides

The code contains a git repository. In the answer_sheet directory you can find in small steps the painting by numbers exercises we ran, as well as the solution to the tweety exercise and the graph coloring exercise that we did. We recommend to persist as long as possible before peeking. The final sample also shows how to calculate the minimum number of colors, so once you’re done with coloring the map, have a play with finding the minimal number of colors.

Looking forward to the SPA conference

Tuesday, May 28th, 2013

I’m looking forward to going to the Software Practice Advancement conference in London again. Not just because of the usual high density of hands-on sessions. The diversity of presenter backgrounds and session topics should make for an interesting mix. I see research academics business owners (not just consultants, but running product businesses as well), developers and even aspiring comedians (thinking of Emanuel Gaillot and Jonathan Perret with their pair programming parody).
Topics are ranging from ethics, Artificial Intelligence, property based tdd and hard-won experience using specific tools and plaforms (nodejs, cloud).

To add to the mix, I’ll be co-hosting a session on a research topic: Answer Set Programming and the next iteration of The joy of TDD on the Raspberry Pi.

Have a look at the programme or even better, register

Server login considered harmful slides at GOTO amsterdam

Thursday, May 24th, 2012

The slides for todays’ talk about devops in general and configuration management with chef in particular are here: gotoams_serverlogin.

As I mentioned yesterday in Server login considered harmful – the next iteration, I changed the structure of the presentation into a brief devops and configuration management and then a chef demo.

That way we had about 15 to 20 minutes left for questions, after explaining the basics of chef (and similar things in puppet) and how to get started. Based on mini xp days I guessed the audience correct, most were developers doing some operations on the side, or working with ops, and most had not seen chef yet.

I had set aside the extra slides, which you can also download. I ended up not using them, covering some of the topics on the side during the demo and during the Q&A.

Having some extra time to go through the example seemed to help. It is quite a lot of information, as  I need to show both a specific application configuration DSL (monit in this case) while introducing chef concepts. Manual syntax highlighting and adding more slides with smaller steps seemed to help.

 

 

 

Server login considered harmful – the next iteration

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

Patrick Debois and Jeffrey Fredrick asked if I could blog about improvements I was making to our presentation “Server Login Considered Harmful” for tomorrows GOTO Amsterdam conference. So here is a quick CHANGELOG.TXT for this presentation :) . What is on the menu for tomorrow is all the way on the bottom of this post.

Feedback on where to take it is welcome, you have until tomorrow morning 10:20 ;) . I was (also) preparing today for tomorrow, because this is an ongoing experience report and I want to incorporate what I’m doing right now in to it. This makes providing a session description in advance a bit hard – the overall theme stays the same, the emphasis shifts depending on the audience and what I’m up to.

This is the fifth iteration of this talk, in which Stephan Eggermont and I try to explain what DevOps in general, and configuration management (for instance with Puppet or Chef) can mean for Developers in particular.

The first iteration at last years’ FOSDEM found us in a room full of seasoned systems administrators. We had a few slides and a Puppet demo. We found doing a demo with a tool like this in such a short timespan a bit too challenging, and not too clear for the audience.

We did do a demo at SPA2011, where we did a half-day hands-on tutorial. Went well. We did find that the same virtualbox VM runs differently on different windows pc’s…. Prepping VMs for a workshop like this is meta-devops ;)

The next two installments were for XP Days benelux last year, and mini xp days this year. We expanded the slide deck to explain more of what we find are principles and values for DevOps, and put a Chef demo purely in slides, so we could focus the explanation. We also decided to go with a Lego theme (we liked Patricks’ BBQ themed slides from last year).

The XP Days and SPA audiences consisted mostly of people who rarely do systems administration.
Feedback from the first xp days was that we could have explained what devops and configuration management meant in general more clearly. Rob Westgeest said we took too much time to explain our case studies, and we should pick one or two. People did like the Lego theme, and were inspired to try out chef or puppet at home, much like at SPA.

For mini XP Days we expanded the slide deck, including a case study for me, and one for Stephan, to focus the case study presentation. We also added some more explanation around the Chef example plus syntax highlighting to show where we increased abstraction from one step to the next. Critical feedback was there were too many lego slides, and on some slides the contrast with the text was not good on the projector. We still have some work to do to clarify the overall theme. Surprising positive feedback was that participants had gained a better understanding of what systems administrators do, and there were quite a few questions on how to get started in a specific situation. Rob said trying chef or puppet was mentioned several time as a takeaway in the conference feedback.

So for this iteration we tested the presentation on a projector to fix contrast, removed some lego (not too much, we still like the theme) and changed the order of the presentation. The chef example now comes first, and if there is time I’ll discuss one case study and values and principles – there is a bit less time and I found discussion and questions the most interesting aspects of this talk, because the audiences and experiences are so diverse. This is also where I get to learn stuff to take home and try out. So I’ll probably let the audience vote on Chef first or case study plus values first to make sure we have time for discussion.

I look forward to seeing you tomorrow!

Spring conferences

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Devnology Community Day, Saturday February 4, Baarn, Netherlands

Keeping with my plan to do more shorter, local conferences and not keeping with my plan to avoid weekend conferences, I’ll be hosting Robert Chatley and Matt Wynne’s eXtreme Startup at the Devnology Community Day

devnology participants in a circle with laptops and tablets
It was great fun to run it at last years’ XP Days Benelux. It’s always amazing to see how focusing on incoming feature requests lets you easily forget the big picture.
Participants at Devnology should have at least as much frustration ;) So bring your laptop or pair up with someone and join the fun. The only
thing you need is your favorite programming environment and a way to respond to HTTP requests.

FOSDEM – Sunday February 5, Brussels, Belgium

If you break a plan, do it in style. So I’ll also be doing something on the Sunday. Stephan Eggermont has arranged a Smalltalk Devroom at FOSDEM

We’ll probably be doing a longer version of Back to the Future, (Re)Learn Smalltalk like we did at the SPA Conference last year.

To keep my sustainable pace, I’ll just move my weekend to the Monday and Tuesday after these conferences. We’ll see how that works out.

Mini XP Days Benelux – Monday April 23, Heeze, Netherlands

Keeping up with the two main session themes of last year, smalltalk and configuration management, Stephan Eggermont and yours truly will rerun our session on getting started with Chef and Puppet at mini XP Days Benelux, the full program is yet to be announced.

Rob Westgeest kindly championed our session, as he assumed we learnt from the feedback from the previous session. The lego-themed slides were well received, but we could have focused the introductory stories more on one or two complete examples, as opposed to telling a bunch of benefits related to things we’ve done. The same went more or less for the code samples. It wasn’t clear to all participants how the ‘big picture’ fit together, so we’ll see if we can visualize that.

I look forward to seeing you at one of these conferences!

Extreme Startup, Smalltalk and Server Login Considered Harmful at XP Days Benelux

Friday, November 25th, 2011

What do Extreme Startup, Smalltalk and Server Login Considered Harmful have in common?

I’ve made some slides to promote sessions about them at XP Days Benelux. Competition for the most hilarious Official Half Minute Pitch at each half day of the conference is fierce. This year sessionorganisers can send in slides. Luckily Stephan Eggermont reminded me that the deadline is right about now. With a few iterations, film poster-like slides are my themes for this year.

When Robert Chatley asked if I wanted to be stand-in for Matt Wynne, who has more sensible priorities than most of us ;) I thought for half a minute and said yes. The eXtreme Startup is a hands-on session that lasts a morning, but allows for new participants halfway through. I attended it at Agile Cambridge, and found it loads of fun and educational. Can you and your partner code against the market and your competitors? Will you deliver the most business value against changing demand? Can you balance the flow of euros against technical debt? Join us this friday at 9:30 in room 16 and find out.

One of the ways to iterate quickly while finding out what is a good market fit, is to use a language and environment that was build to explore the unknown. Join Stephan Eggermont and yours truly this Friday at 16:30 in Room 16 and find out how web development can be like desktop GUI development, and how Debugger Driven Development optimizes your inner software development loop! No code was harmed in the making of this session.

So, you’ve found your strategy to find your market and keep up with it and you’ve found a development sweet spot. Now your deployments can’t keep up. Servers burn down, your mail is a spam magnet and as a systems administrator you are getting tired of late night phone calls. Devops configuration management to the rescue? Come to our session “Server Login Considered Harmful” and find out if Chef can save your Puppet’s bacon. Find out this Thursday at 11:00, again – surprise surprise? – in Room 16.

XP Days Benelux is already sold out, I just wanted to share the fun Ihad in preparing it. Still hoping to see you there :) .

on/off the road :)

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

With the holiday season almost ending it is time to make plans for the rest of the year. Summer was enjoyable; After Marc and I went to the ESSAP summer school in Varese, we drove to Luzern, Switzerland for the first, and very succesful, in-house run of the Unit Testing Masterclass. Marc, Rob and I learnt a lot about what works (and what doesn’t) in our courses in the first half of this year, and it was very satisfying to see it come together… when we experiment it does’nt always, of course – the price of a little courage. I took two full weeks of holiday – highly recommended to you (yes you!), my fellow workaholics. Then on to agile2008 in Toronto, which I took as a sort of extended holiday, swimming everyday, chatting with people, the occasional session, and my last meetings as a member of the agile alliance board – I want to focus more on my business and travel less between timezones if it’s not business. And then a small roadtrip afterwards.

Now I’m ‘not travelling’ – visiting my girfriend in Bath, while working remotely, and meeting some people in London at the eXtreme Tuesday Club tonight.

I’m busy brainstorming some new training courses, and turning the spike of a customer relationship management system for eXperience Agile (soon to be relaunched under a different name, watch this space :) ) into something that is tested and ready for production. With Emmanuel Gaillot we’re translating eXperience Refactoring into “des excursions dans le rémaniement continu”, which we’ll do in-house in September, and hope to do an open enrollment one in Paris in October. In the Netherlands we’re planning to do some more open enrollment courses:

And 29 October I’ll be presenting “right sizing your unit tests” (a taster session for our unit testing masterclass) with Marc at the Scandinavian Agile Conference. I’ll probably also be running a session (wich one to be decided yet) at Xp Days Benelux November 20 & 21 in my hometown of Eindhoven and then later on enjoying the open space at XpDay London, 11th & 12th December.

And of course I’m planning to make more plans and blogging to make more blogs ;)