rebelutionary / 2.0

Alright - who let the cat out of the bag? / 2003 Apr 15

Damnit - I was scooped by my own referrer logs.

Well, I checked mine this AM and saw that our old pal Mike Cannon-Brookes, a true rebelutionary is getting back into the swing of the blogging thing with a brand new blog.

Yes - I am indeed back and will hopefully be blogging with much more regularity. I feel I've been missing the 'brain-fluff' release that comes with just dumping thoughts to your blog to clear your head! I had not intended to be scooped in my own blog relaunch, but I suppose it does not really matter as now others are joining the fray

His suspected SARS episode may not be over however as he seems to be running MovableType. This could all be an elaborate hoax by the guys who brought you JIRA. Time will tell!

Luckily it was just a suspected episode and in reality a very bad flu. Flying in from Singapore a few days before the shit hit the fan there was not a good sign for the doctors.

As for MovableType - no, it's not a hoax. I believe in using the best tool for the job and, no offense to Roller, Blojsom, XRoller or any other Java tool, MovableType kicks some serious ass at the moment with all it's plugins (for example textile is brilliant for rapidly writing blog-html).

Does that mean I won't reevaluate in the future? Not at all. I'm going to play with the Roller demonstration application for WebWork 2 because WW2 is seriously awesome to use. On a side note, my hugest congratulations to Patrick, Jason and all the others who have pushed XWork and WebWork 2 so far along already.

So where the hell have I been?

Well, life got the better of me recently so here's a quick summary cause I know you're all interested (note: if you're not, that's perfectly understandable - feel free to read javablogs instead ;)). Hopefully this gives you some indication of why there hasn't been a lot of blog-tivity recently.

Atlassian (my baby) is growing up rapidly. We've moved into some fantastic, slick new offices in Sydney (Level 1, 141 York St directly behind the QVB - if anyone is around, feel free to drop by for a coke/beer). We have chairs but no desks yet. No desks? Yep - the desks are still being built and should be delivered jut after ANZAC day. At the moment we have up to 5 or 6 people working around one large boardroom table, which is the cause for great amusement at times.

Software wise - JIRA 2 (the world's best bug tracking software package ;)) has been released and is so far getting a fantastic reception from our customers. Thank you all. We're all madly working on JIRA 2.1 and the Enteprise edition at the moment. Stay tuned for some really cool stuff in those releases.

XP? You traitor!

At work we're in the process of adopting XP (aka - "going the whole hog") as a development methodology and so far it's working quite well. Thoughts so far?

• We have a wall full of story cards and have just started our first iteration. Playing the planning game was fun, and definitely helped to get the direction clear in everyone's minds.
• Pair programming is something that takes a lot of getting used to (it does feel a little like running in sand at the moment).
• Using whiteboards for instant design meetings is proving a boon (of course it helps that our new offices has whiteboards everywhere).
• Unit testing is something we've been doing heavily for a while now (we have over 1200 tests at latest count), but true test driven development and up front acceptance testing is something that's harder to learn.

I'm sure XP is a topic that I'll blog plenty more on in the future as I become one of those rabid enthusiasts ;)

What's that? Someone is paying me to write?

Yep - that's right. I have been writing a book with three other total gurus (trust me when I say it's a true pleasure to work with people of that stature - and extremely scary). The book is moving along nicely and should be published later this year. The topic? Well, I can't go into too much detail but let's just say it's about writing J2EE applications properly using best-of-breed components.

Around the world in 80 days

Well, with modern aircraft technology I managed to do it in just over half that time. I returned from a round the world trip about two weeks ago (Australia > Chile > Brazil > America > England > Singapore > Australia) - part holiday, part work trip. South America was brilliant an I will definitely be going back. Visiting Atlassian customers and JIRA users on 4 continents was brilliant too. The buzz I got from our clients was truly amazing, thank you to all of you. A special big thanks to all of the London ThoughtWorks gurus - I use that in the truest sense of the world, I have never seen a company which has such universal high quality of people. If I'm ever looking for a job, you will be the first door I knock on.

Welp - time to get back to work now. Keep coming back, I'm sure there will be much more interesting posts in the future. Apologies for the life story!

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