• 18:45 – Welcome by Nick Ashley, MD of ThoughtWorks Deutschland
• 19:00 – Wolf Schlegel: “Dos and don’ts of Continuous Integration and Delivery”
• 19.20 – Erik Dörnenburg: “Lean for enterprise architecture
• 19:45 – Martin Fowler: “Software Design in the 21st Century”
• 20:30 – Networking – drinks and food

Unfortunately, I missed about half of Wolf Schlegel’s talk on Continous Delivery, but judging on the second half, I would have preferred more in-depth discussion of technologies and best practices. The talk seemed like a space-station’s eye view of the topic.

Erik Dörnenburg was next talking about Lean Enterprise Architecture. I very much liked his analogy of comparing the role of a Software Architect to that of a Gardener instead of a traditional Architect. Spot on. Quite a few interesting thoughts on how to causing change in an organisation / team, too.

Martin Fowler gave two short talks, on on “Domain Specific Languages” and one on “Nondeterministic Tests“.

I was quite keen on the Domain Specific Language part, as we’re currently moving away from a “home-grown” Domain Specific Language for NC-code templating & output to a Python-based solution as we found that our own language lacked the expressiveness we are looking for. My key take-away was that there are two ways to create a DSL, external & internal and that we’re migrating from an external DSL to an internal DSL. Looks like the DSL book is supposed to be on my reading list real soon now.

Martin’s thoughts on “Nondeterministic Tests” were especially interesting as I was attending a talk on “Unit Testing & Concurrency” right last week in Karlsruhe. Very interesting to see the different takes on the topic – Abstracting away the concurrency altogether for unit testing purposes whereas Martin was leaning towards integration & acceptance testing and giving very sound advice on how to deal with concurrency issues within the tests (polling, callbacks, test doubles).

As you might have imagined, I mostly skipped the Networking part due to my sociophobia.

Overall, a very worthwhile evening and I very much look forward to future Thoughtworks events.

Apple Computer announced that it had acquired NeXT, Inc. for about $400M.

January 1997

We had been working our asses off for about 3 years to get our OpenDoc-based database components to a usable and sellable state. Together with a band of other OpenDoc developers, we intended to make a big splash at MacWorld 1997, San Francisco. And a reasonable splash we made. Customer were excited about our products, other developers were excited about interfacing to our components and international Distributors were lining up to localize & sell our components.

Members of the Apple Enterprise Sales team (yup, back then there was such a thing) had been arranging a meeting at NeXT headquarters with a couple of NeXT engineers for us to promote our components and to get a feeling for where thing are heading. I do vividly remember sitting in a conference room in Redwood city with several NeXT engineers, among them a rather young opinionated guy named Scott Forstall, and the NeXT engineers basically dismissing the idea of loosely coupled, componentized software.

March 1997

On March, 14th, Apple Computer was putting OpenDoc into maintenance mode – which was the marketing weasels way of saying that the platform our product was based on was dead in the water. We were devastated – For three years, we had been pouring our heart, soul and last, but not least, a lot of our personal money into the product and it was dead.

CeBIT, the world largest computer fair, was upon us and, despite Apple’s announcement about OpenDoc’s demise, we were scheduled to show our OpenDoc components at the Apple booth in Hannover. We didn’t go.

Mark B. Johnson, a fine man and head of European developer relations back then, called us and expressed his hope that, despite the OpenDoc debacle, we would support the Apple platform going forward. He offered us WWDC tickets so we could talk to Apple engineers and get a glimpse on where Apple was heading in the future.

May 1997

WWDC was in San Jose Convention Center back then. I do remember sitting in the main hall next to @BradHutchings during Friday’s Q&A session. I’m not 100% sure, but I think it was Brad who was asking the infamous question “What about OpenDoc?” at the very beginning of the Q&A session (about 4:30min into the video).

It wasn’t fun. Steve’s answer was frank, to the point and, in hindsight, spot on – but see for yourself:

Rest in peace, Steve. I’ve learned an awful lot from you over the years.

And now I’m off pre-ordering an iPhone 4S for both me & my oldest daughter.

Flipping through the DVD jewel case I found an “iTunes Digital Copy” leaflet with an activation code, allowing me to import the DVD into iTunes without the need to circumvent DRM.

Yup, the DRM is still there, it’s still a royal pain in the … and it’s still bad for everyone involved – but at least the Fox / iTunes guys came up with a solution which made our 7+ hours car trip to La Plagne last week more enjoyable for everyone.

Twitter: ACM ernennt Prof. Walter F. Tichy zum “Distinguished Scientist”: http://www.informatik.kit.edu/309_5306.php

Es gab drei Professoren & Vorlesungen in meinem Studium der Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe, die mein Denken noch heute nachhaltig beeinflussen:

• Prof. Walter F. Tichy – Softwaretechnik – In seiner Anfangszeit in Karlsruhe hielt Prof. Tichy Vorlesungen auf Englisch. Das öffnete mir die Augen: Wer in der IT-Branche tätig ist und nicht überdurchschnittlich Englisch spricht bzw. schreibt & liest wird auf Dauer keine Chance haben, sich durchzusetzen.
• Prof. Peter C. Lockemann – Datenbanksysteme – Ich habe selten einen so klar denkenden und kommunizierenden Menschen kennengelernt, weder an der Universität noch im Berufsleben.
• Prof. Horst Wettstein – Systemarchitekur – Eine Vorlesung überragender Klarheit & Struktur, ganz bewußt unter Verzicht auf englische Termini gehalten.

equals to

• 38 iPhone / iPad apps waiting to be updated
• 1 system software update for iPhone 3GS
• 1 system software update for iPad
• 3 betas of some software I’m not supposed to talk about
• 8 updates to MacOS based apps
• 1 update to Confluence
• 1 update to FishEye
• 3 servers asking for MacOS updates
• Several thousand mails
• 4658 RSS feed items
• gazillions of tweets
• several hundred yammer “tweets”
• uncounted updates to our Confluence site

which translates to several days of downloading, installing, processing, filtering.

Konfuzius: “Ruhm ist wie ein müder Hund, der seinem Herrn nur einmal zuwedelt.”

Hägar: “Das war Mist!”

Konfuzius: “Es kann nicht alles Spitze sein.”

(c) Dick / Chris Browne / King Features Syndicate

We ate stones for lunch back then. Sometimes, there was only stone soup.

I started to get into computers in 9th grade, which was in 1981. Although I wasn’t part of the elitist computer project group, I had a friend who let me sneak in the computer room. Our school had two Apple II+ and an old Wang computer (unfortunately, I don’t remember the model). I do remember the Wang had about 16KB of RAM (magnetic core memory at the time). The RAM module was about at least 1m3 in size). Roughly around the same time, another friend of mine told me that a smallish company in our village was looking for “computer programmers”. So I went and spend the better part of my spare time as a high school and university student developing software in BASIC, PASCAL, C and C++ for various precursors and contemporaries of the IBM PC and, later, the Apple Macintosh.

• Apple II+ – 140 KB floppy disk. 5 1/4″. Single-sided. This was considered mass-storage. Of course you could use the backside of the floppy disk if you knew where to punch a hole. Of course, you would program it in 6502 assembly language. LDA #$22.
• Commodore CBM II – Considered cool at the time due to its curvy design.
• Burroughs B20 series – I vividly remember a Borroughs 8088-based early B20 series computer. It came with an enormous monitor and CPU unit mounted next to each other which was so large it occupied most of my desk and thus about 1/3 of my room as a student. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find a picture of this system online.
• ZX 81 – This was the first computer I bought myself from whatever little money I made. It was a very clever, although quite awkward little computer, consisting of only 4 chips on board. It had 1KB of RAM. No, that’s not a typo.
• IBM /36 – Yes, in RPG-II. No, I don’t remember any of it. I refuse to.
• Nixdorf 8870 – Programmed in Basic. All variables had 2 character identifiers. First one had to be alpha, second numeric. K4$ was the string holding the current record read from the database. 5 MB hard drive the size of a medium fridge.
• Sun 3/60 – Using vi and TeX to write a seminar paper at the university.
• VAX 11/780 – Taking a LISP course at the university. Fully grokked recursion back then. Never learned to implement a proper loop in LISP. Recursion was all I needed. It’s fun bringing the VAX to a halt by running your student’s assignment. “Who is this user LISP70 who consumes too much CPU and way too much memory?”
• Nixdorf Targon – 68030-based. UNIX. Pretty cool. You could login via 10 virtual tty’s and start a C compiler in each. vi in your 11th virtual tty was still kind of usable. :wq.
• IBM PC – Yup, the real one. Not the XT.
• Novell Netware 2 on a 80286-based file server – Novell’s Netware 2 over 10BASE2 (of course) was so fast that we didn’t compile our C programs locally on our Compaq PC’s hard drives, but used the Novell server to host the files instead.
• Atari ST – My second “home” computer. Fantastic machine. 68000 processor. MIDI interface. I even bought a Yamaha DX-21 synth to interface with the ST. Way cool.

In 1989, a friend of mine showed me a Mac emulator running on an Atari ST featuring pirated Apple Mac ROMs. I knew I had to have one. In 1989/1990, Apple ran a Mac SE promo for students which I took advantage of. Working with MPW Object Pascal and later, C++. Even a simple build of our system took 15 minutes+, which made for a great excuse to watch Snooker on TV all day. Those were the days. The Mac SE was upgraded to an SE/30 via a logic board upgrade later on. 68030 / 16 MHZ. Blazingly fast at the time.

Here are some of the Mac’s I used over the years: Mac SE – Mac SE/30 – Mac IIci – Mac IIfx – Centris 610, Centris 650, Quadra 700, PowerMac 7200, PowerBook 100, Powerbook 160, PowerBook Duo 210, Powerbook 5300, Titanium Powerbook G4, AiBook, MacBook Pro 15″ (which I’m writing the post on). Plus quite a few Windows PCs, 8086, 8088, 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium based. But I lost track. Not a lot of personality and soul left in the computers nowadays. See, I knew I would say it

I find start-up time for native apps generally much shorter than their web-based counterparts. A crucial feature if you want to whip out your device for a quick check while waiting in the supermarket queue (if you have network access in your local supermarket, but that’s a different story). Plus, native apps don’t need to pull functionality & UI over the network, which takes time, too. They just pull raw data. Which shortens the time from “clicking the app in the Springboard” to “seeing the content I want to”. Even if most of the JavaScript is cached locally, there’s still the need to periodically pull updated functionality.

More elaborate UI

Native UIs tend to be more elaborate, more sophisticated and, most importantly, much smoother and faster than any Web-based UI. Which isn’t that much surprising if you think about JITing, network latency issues and the need to download at least part of the UI over the network. Native UIs & apps shave off a few more milliseconds from that crucial start-up time.

Off-line mode

I need a full-featured offline mode. There’s no such thing as 100% cell coverage. Connection to the 3G network is (and will be for the foreseeable future) spotty at best (No, most of us don’t live, work & play next to a cell tower 24/7). I even have dead WLAN spots in my house. And you do, too. I can’t get to my carrier’s data network from the local supermarkets checkout line. That said, there’s some room for improvement even for native apps whose primary purpose is displaying content pulled from the internet: Off-line access should be designed right into the app instead of being tagged-on as a second thought.

Battery

Pulling less bytes over the network, no need for JITing etc. means less battery drain on my device.

Cost

There are iPhones users out there which do not have a flat rate data plan. Having native apps, even for simple games or utility apps which could be done as a web-page, is crucial for this type of mobile user. Even a few bytes send over the carrier’s network cost these users an arm and a leg (on non jail-broken iPhones, access to the carriers network cannot be easily turned off).

Update I

There has been quite some discussion on Twitter about Web apps featuring offline modes, slick Javascript UI libraries for iPhone etc. I seriously doubt that @chockenberry‘s stupendous Twitterific could be done as a Web app with the same attention to detail & performance. And while web apps & technologies are catching up in terms of functionality (and they still have some significant catching up to do), native technologies do not stagnate, either… I think each every point I made still applies today (and will apply for the foreseeable future) in the mobile space.

Web technologies are great for building certain types of applications, e.g. traditional database-driven applications, fully replacing what used to be client-server applications back in the paleozoic era. Web applications work great in an environment where either network connectivity is the norm or where you have discreet slices of time with stable network connectivity – but they will have a hard time catching on big-time in the mobile space.

Update II

John Gruber makes a similar, albeit way more elaborate and way more well-thought-out point. He is still more optimistic about the future of web apps on mobile devices than I am.