ThoughtWorks is looking at Sweden


I am not sure how well it comes across in my blog posts, but joining ThoughtWorks have been the best move of my life. I can’t really describe what a wonderful place this is to be (for me at least). I sometimes try – in person, after a few beers – but I always end up not being able to capture the real feeling of working for a company that is more than a company.

I’m happy at being with ThoughtWorks. It’s as simple as that – I feel like I’ve found my home.

So imagine how happy I am to tell you that ThoughtWorks is exploring opportunities for an office in Sweden!

Now, I am one of the persons involved in this effort, and we have been talking about it for a while (actually, we started talking about it for real not long after I joined). But now it’s reality. The first trips to Sweden will be in January. ThoughtWorks will be sponsoring JFokus (which is shaping up to be a really good conference, by the way. I’m happy to have been presenting there the first year). We will have a few representatives at JFokus, of course. I will be there, for example. =)

Of course, exploring Sweden is not the same thing as saying that an office will actually happen. But we think there are good reasons to at least consider it. I personally think it would be a perfect fit, but I am a bit biased about it.

So what are we doing for exploration? Well, of course we have started to look into business opportunities and possible clients. We are looking at partnerships and collaboration. We are looking at potential recruits. But really, the most important thing at this stage is to talk to people, get a feeling for the lay of the land, get to know interesting folks that can give us advice and so on. And that is what our travels in January will be about.

So. Do you feel you might fit any of the categories of people above? We’d love to meet you and talk – very informally. So get in touch.

This is exciting times for us!



JFokus post-mortem


Yesterday marked the first one day conference in Sweden focused on Java. All in all, it was a resounding success. I am personally very happy about how well everything ran. The only part that wasn’t really up to par was the panel discussion.

So, a quick rehash of the day. First Simon Phipps did his thing in the keynote, speaking much about where Sun’s open source initiative comes from. I would have liked some more specific info on the future though, but I guess that’s hard for him to say…

After that, Thorbiörn Fritzon from Sun in Sweden started of the Language track with talking about some new features in Mustang, specifically some Swing topics and the JSR 223 support (scripting). After that he showcased a really cool stack-based calculator he’d hacked during the weekend, where you could attach the functioning of the buttons to different scripts, and the scripts could be implemented in any language on the classpath that supported JSR 223. The final showdown of calculator buttons was first a script in Haskell (using Jaskell) that pushed a lambda on the stack. This lambda curried addition, with the first object on the stack. Then another script written in Python popped the lambda from the stack, popped the next value and called the lambda with the value from the stack, in effect doing an addition the longer way…

After that it was time for my presentation. It felt really good and I believe most in the audience was satisfied.

After that I sat in on Dan Bergh Johnsson from Omegapoint talking about domain driven design, and how to refactor to find your domain. I found it quite elementary, and nothing really new.

Last, Jonas Bonér talked about OpenTerracotta, which is an incredibly cool tool for clustering your JVM applications, and by doing that achieving many different cool things. Look it up! I wish there had been more time for Jonas to get in depth about the implementation of Terracotta, though. Most interesting thing he told us was about a situation where they wanted about 50-80 clients pounding in a cluster at the same time, and they used Terracotta for this too, using a CyclicBarrier that was synchronized over all the JVM’s. Very nice.

The panel debate wasn’t that interesting. Most of the questions asked by the moderator didn’t really achieve any discussion. Open sourcing Java doesn’t seem like such a controversial topic anymore.

After the debate, the conference was over, but then BEA provided a pub evening with entertainment, so we stayed and networked a little, talked with interesting people and generally had fun. After that, six of us continued to a pub in Stockholm, called Monk’s Cafe, where we drank good Belgium beer and talked until our throats were sore. A very interesting day, no doubts.



Focus on Java, this Tuesday


This Tuesday is JFokus in Stockholm, where I will talk about Java, JRuby and RSpec and how to combine these in exciting ways. Let me tell you, I look forward to speaking about this. I believe there is something incredibly useful in combining technologies like this.

Of course, it would also have been great fun to take about where JRuby is at right now, since there is so much cool stuff going on at the moment. When the 0.9.3 release comes along, I bet many people will be surprised and as excited as I am about this. I will get back with more information what has happened in the codebase lately quite soon.

If you’re going to JFokus, please say hi if you see me!



I will present at JFokus


A few weeks ago I noted that Sun in Sweden announced on the JavaForum meetup that they were going to have a full day Java conference in January. This conference is called JFokus and will have 4 different tracks with 4 speakers on each track. I will feature in one of these tracks, talking about testing Java code with JRuby and RSpec, and also how to build a DSL for doing database integration testing using Ruby. I believe it will be very interesting, and the rest of the day looks incredible nice too.

So, if you’re in Sweden, Jan 30:th, look into it!

More information can be found at the official site: http://www.jfokus.se/.