End of blog

It has almost been a year since my last post. I have been very much keeping up with IT (research skills, Ruby on Rails through Coursera, done a great TDD workshop with Jamie Dobson, etc) but no longer feel the urge to blog about it.

So goodbye and see you through some other medium.

Presentation for the institute

Since I had done a little "research on research" :-) I was asked to give a presentation for our institute's gathering the other week. I used the title "the road to my first publication" since I had mainly looked into the writing side.

Some of my points:

- It takes a lot of focussed work, more than we probably realize or are organized for at the moment. Looking at myself, I can't really make the time to write my article on the IMLVG project, let alone start new research on my own.

- It is fun however to learn new skills while taking the little steps.

- There is a lot of tooling out there to use. I showed the following:

- Finding literature: databases, catalogues, etc. These take some time to learn. Despite the librarian's disapproval I find Google Scholar very useful (investigate the different functions and options!) I also discussed some search techniques.

- Managing references: I use RefWorks since it's the RuG standard, but would prefer to use Papers if I can get my hands on an iPad.

- Reading and annotating: I prefer to read electronically, but taking notes is bothersome. I replaced the bloated Adobe Acrobat with a lightweight PDF annotation tool, but still....

- Keeping a journal: I am very pleased with the discovery of Microsoft OneNote, an largely neglected application in the MS Office-suite.

- Writing: academic writing is a speciality on it's own. I stumbled upon a course at the Hanze, but it mainly showed me that there's a lot of work to do in that area as well.

And now we have won an Interreg grant for a large international project. Will this mean I have to change track again?

Visiting Madrid

I was invited by UPM again to visit Madrid for some lectures. Just like last year it has been an enjoyable experience. I had to work hard to prepare a 3-hour lecture on Lean and Kanban, but the work paid off.

I'm also constantly comparing UPM with our own university. How are the students? Which topics are taught and in which way? This afternoon I had the opportunity to learn more about the way they do research. Interesting. Every time I talk to people about research, my own view of it keeps changing...

Swimming at sea

Now I know what a student feels like. My lector asked me "to do some research next semester". I'm free to choose a topic as long as it is within one of the topics of the research group (eHealth, ICT & Energy, offshoring, ...). At this point I'm still wrestling with my topic of choice. What will I do? What will I do about it? Is this feasible? Is it too big a topic? I'm not coming to a conclusion just yet.

What I *am* doing is training myself in the necessary skills. So if you're in the same position, here's what I did:

- I searched enough literature to find out that I wasn't skilled in searching it

- So I went to the library to get some instruction. In 2 hours I was up and running. Part of the efficiency came from my direct questions based on my unsuccesful searches.

- I looked at reference managers. IF I had a Mac I'd go with Papers, but for now I'm sticking with RefWorks. It's not as nice as Papers but it's the standard at the RuG with which we have some agreements.

- I'm getting myself organised with Microsoft OneNote which is part of Office. That's a brilliant product for a filer like me. I can organise my notes, logs and all my other workrelated stuff.

- I went to the library to skim some books about research. There are too many titles to mention. How to Research by Blaxter was a nice one with a lot of practical checklists. But research can only be learned by doing...

Train hard, win easy

In order to keep up with IT my next challenge for myself was to become Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP, CX-310-065). I took the exam yesterday and scored a nice 95%. I'll share some observations about the whole process.

Preparation
I first took a two day exam training (utilizing some special HBO-fund ). Looking back this wasn't really necessary, but didn't hurt me either.
I already had an impressive exam book by Rasmussen but the book I got at the training was even better. The Rasmussen book is very comprehensive but the (for me) difficult topics of generics and inner classes were too dry to get through. The Sierra/Bates book was just more readable.
At the end of the training we took a mock exam and I scored 60%. The current pass norm is 58% (used to be 65%). So I decided to study my weak topics and all should be ok. After studying my weak topics I took the 2nd mock exam: 60%! Hmmm, shouldn't I be scoring higher?
After about 30 hours of going through the entire book during the christmas holidays I took the 3rd mock exam. 61% WTF!? I never had so little return for so much study.

I was starting to get pretty annoyed with the whole thing. The Sierra/Bates questions were often about nitty gritty details, or contained tricks within tricks within tricks. I'd study a whole chapter and the first test question was about the exception to the exception in some small corner.

The last day of study I toyed around with live code, instead of just reading the book. This also helped and I could have done more of that.

Exam
Then the exam came. It turned out to be way more easy than the Sierra/Bates mock exams. One big difference is that Sierra/Bates phrased most questions as "choose all that can apply". On the real exam most often the number of options to choose was specified ("choose the 3 correct answers"). That made a huge difference. The other big difference was just that the questions were less tricky. There were some, but most questions were straight about testing your understanding on the topic at hand.

Another weird thing was that I identified 3 (out of 60) questions to have clear reproducible errors in them. And these were unintentionally since the answer "will not compile" was no option. One was a declaration "private name;" (missing String), the other was "private void() methodName{}" (parentheses misplaced). The other was "choose the two correct options" but then providing a radiobutton . I find this pretty astounding for an official exam taken by thousands of people.

Afterthoughts
Then came my score: 95%! At first I was happy, but then felt a bit disappointed. If it is this easy and the norm is 58% then everyone can to this. The certification isn't very exclusive and I could have saved a lot of studytime. Oh well, I'll just make sure to mention my score to everyone ;-)

So does this whole experience make me a better programmer (/lecturer)? I'd say that 50% of the effort was useful in seeing things about the Java language in which I didn't have much experience. The other 50% is more a testimony of determination, concentration, focus and study capabilities. But I could also have shown that by learning Spanish or how to play the piano (oh, if only a day had 48 hours... :-)

Next stop is to educate myself more on research but I'll be back for the developer exam (SCJD) in the future.

The best way to fail for a student

Today we will finish our project for Datema with demo's, presentation and prizegiving. We had five groups working on a web app, Android app and iPad app. In general the results are satisfactory.

Pete* however had not been up to the task. He never got his hands on the keyboard and learning objective C was too difficult for him. I had noticed that and the peerassessment confirmed it. I invited Pete over for an individual examination which he probably wouldn't pass.

When Pete entered the room I asked him if we should go through with it, or rather discuss his issues. We ended up talking about his problems, possible solution, his future ambitions and his choices for the rest of his studies. This was much more valuable to him than doing the individual test. When he left he had a new vision about what he wanted to do and how to get there. If you fail for a subject, make sure you get something out of it.

Twitter

Blogging about Twitter, ehhh... right. I've looked into Twitter for the Datema-project (www.wikipilot.org) and think I have the hang of it now. But the big question is: will it be really useful? I'll give it some time to find out.
I see a great use case for Twitter in the chess world. If every player or captain gave some tweets after the game, you'd have a really nice way of following all the matches. But I'm afraid I'm probably the only member of our club who has a clue about Twitter.

Research

Last week I went to a seminar on research. Boring? Dry? No! The seminar was titled "Research in professional education, there's more possible than you think" and was run by Bas Haring and Maarten Lamers. Bas Haring is best known of the two, but they make a great couple and complement eachother seamlessly.

The angle of the seminar was that the universities of applied science (which in the Netherlands are just getting started with research) shouldn't try to emulate what the research universities are doing for centuries. Instead we should make use of our own strengths to find new subjects and research them in creative new ways.

For me the biggest takeaway however was an enhanced vision of what research is, separated from how it's done. Another big point we kind of discovered as a group is the confusion between "uitzoeken" and "onderzoeken". (Trying to translate these in English doesn't resolve the confusion.) Probably a lot of activities which are called 'onderzoek' in reality are 'uitzoeken'.
Finally I also have some ideas about how to integrate research in our curriculum. That might be useful because the rest of the organisation is kinda struggling with that. :-)

A new project for Agile Software Development

For years we used the Cab Dispatcher as the standard project in our Agile Software Development course. It still is a great (fictional) case study but it was time for a change. Last year we experimented with the case study on monitoring mentally handicapped people. Doing a new case poses a number of challenges to the lecturers, but it was closer to the real world.
This year we're taking it a step further by doing a real-life project with a client in the business of shippingnavigation. I think it will be very interesting. Let's see what the students think about it.

Summertime & mobile devices

It has been a long summer which I have used to study a lot of stuff, both professional and private. One of the things we did was buy a Nintendo for the kids and find out how to (...).

What amazes me is the amount of game- and userexperience comes from such a small device, i.e. in a nice game like Picross3D. Compare this to the new HTC smartphone (Windows mobile) I got from my office a while ago. It looks cool but has the size of a refridgerator, the powerconsumption of a SUV and I'm not enjoying the usability.

When is Nintendo developing a mobile phone?

Lean architecture

Just before the summer holiday started I went to a NLJUG university session by Xebia. The evening was about their concept of "lean architecture". Lean architecture means applying lean principles like "eliminate waste" to the architecting process. And there is quite some waste to eliminate at most companies :)

After presenting their principles (http://www.slideshare.net/xebia/lean-architecture-university-session-for-nljug-at-xebia-on-july-8th-2010 ) we quickly got to work on a case study. And maybe this was the most instructive part for me. Getting a fuzzy assignment, too little time and a bunch of people. "Go and do it." As an outsider I would say that there were way too much degrees of freedom in the workshop (I counted 8). While you were working on 1 or 2, you would be interrupted about one of the others. Never mind, my take away point is to keep this in mind when I set my students to work.

At the questions at the end they put on their "process" slide. I felt a bit uneasy with it. Agile was al about keeping things simple. But now the scrum process was extended with a productbacklog kanban and an architecture kanban and relationships between the three. Oh well, when you need to choose between changing people or processes, maybe changing processes is easier?

Finally!

After about 8 years of trying (not fulltime ;-), I FINALLY got an RMI example to work. And with that I mean working as it should by transferring classfiles, not cheating by putting the classfiles of the server on the clientside.

In 2002 I understood the concepts in about 15 minutes and the rest of years was pure frustration on crappy tutorials and technical details (trailing slashes, classpaths, codebases, security policies). I tried to find my original 2002 posts on the Sun developer forums but they are either archived or banned. My point was then and still is now: if you can't get a HelloWorld working in 15 minutes (ok, 1 hour) then the technology won't catch on. I've seen plenty of students give it a try and I couldn't blame them when they quit.

Glad I can put this one behind me, let's move on to other things now. I have a whole list for the coming holiday ;-)

Update: : http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/rmi/index.html was the most useful tutorial

Karlstad university

I visited Karlstad university (Sweden) with some colleagues last week. It's a former Högskule that has transformed itself into a university with a lot of research activities (and funding!). This took a long term effort however. I can imagine this is the vision our rector Henk Pijlman has of the direction the Hanze should move into. My estimate is that it would take 10-15 years of concentrated effort, a lot of it on the personnelmanagement side.

We met some nice and interesting colleagues (Anna Brunstrum, Donald Ross, Martin Blom) and discussed collaboration possibilities on agile among other things. I got a nice idea about the coding dojo which I would like to give a spin next year. Finally we also went to the Compare Testlab and met Sven Wedemalm.

Universidad Polytecnica Madrid

Last week I did my first Erasmus lectures. I was invited at the Universidad Polytecnica Madrid to give four lectures. As the topic I chose agile software development. This obligation had as an effect that I prepared pretty hard, developing new teaching material and learning even more about scrum, kanban and lean in the process. I now have a new case study which I really like and I hope I can reuse in on other occasions. UPM would probably like me to come back next year, I'll have to check with my boss and the internationalisation officer if that's feasible. Once you go international, there are so many places to choose from.

What more can I say about the experience? Madrid is nice, the spanish people are friendly, the country doesn't differ that much with the Netherlands, except for their eating schedule. The students were about as I expected: stronger on the theoretical issues, not very experienced on the practical side and they need to work on their English.

Thus I have finished another challenge to myself. The hardest part was the preparation. But you know what they say: "Train hard, win easy" :-)

Busy times...

These are busy times, I need a lot of time just to keep my todo-list up-to-date. So Keeping up with IT is more Learning on the job at the moment.

Internationalisation

• Tomas Gustavsson from Karlstad University is coming over to give a workshop on Scrum, with the emphasis on starting up a project.
• A delegation of Fachgymnasium Papenburg is coming over to discuss whether our studies are interesting for their students.
• In March I'll go to Universidad Polytecnica de Madrid for a week to give some lectures on agile software development. I combine this with mentoring Hanzestudents who are doing their graduation work there (on the subject of Google wave).

Research
Research? Not really research yet in my opinion. I'm involved in the NOVO-project (see earlier posts) but at this point it's about system development. Requirements, use cases and architecture are starting for real now. The build team (Q3+Q4) will consist of 3 students and we'll be using Scrum.

Curriculum Development

• I'll need to update our 2nd year software engineering course with more multithreading because of the "multi-core revolution". Also, our strategy of intensifying the 1st year has led to material going from 2nd to 1st year. This creates room for some other topics!
  
• Software architecture will be added to our 4th year, a non-trivial job.

Accreditation
For the accreditation our institute will be visited by Hobeon in the fall. This means there's a lot of work for us to get ready.

Honours
I'm participating in the project group that's developing a honours course for excellent students. After some brainstorming we've got the right ideas. Now we have to see if we can match them with the 'guidelines' that came down from Hanze central.

And I still have a buildtool/continuous integration server on my wishlist. But I'm afraid it will have to wait some more...

Just a thought

We used to have the slogan De student centraal (The student is central, focus on the student, etc. ) Yesterday one of our eductational advisors said to me "That's history. A better way to put it is, Het leren van de student centraal" (The learning of the student is central.)

Don't ask your child what he (she) did today, ask him what he learned today :-)

Scrum Master

I just had two days of training on Scrum by the guru himself (Jeff Sutherland) and Serge Beaumont (Xebia). After doing XP for a while, I now can complement it with Scrum and have two legs to stand on ;-) I won't try to give a full account here what Scrum is, but it doesn't really cover the same stuff XP does. In one sentence you could say it's "extreme projectmanagement", or just "a framework for getting things done". The final goal is to get your team into "hyperproductive state".

The training was ok, I'd give it a 7.5/10. The material could have been presented a bit more structured (tell 'm what you're gonna tell 'm, then tell 'm, then tell 'm what you told them) but the content was ok. I appreciate the fact that they tried to support their story with data and referring to literature.

Completing this two day course (+exam) makes me a "Certified Scrum Master". After some more experience you can become a Certified Scrum Practitioner. Personally I would have switched those titles, but it's probably for historical reasons.

Already the next morning I noticed that I was unconsciously using some of the stuff. What's the business value of my wife opening the curtains when her goal is to get the kids to school on time? What's the business value of discussing a student who wants to enroll when he has missed the first 2.5 weeks of a quarter?
Let's keep this way of thinking and see if I can enter a hyperproductive state ;-)

Today was another edition of the JFall. I took the light version by skipping the keynotes and not trying to score every goodie there was to get. ;-) As it turned out my programme had a high "Google" percentage. Coincidence or is the influence of Google spreading ever more?

I started out with "How to introduce Agile in my organisation?" (Erwin vd Koogh, Xebia). No revolutionary insights but a few nice twists to remember. The magic formula is Action = Pain x Budget and developers have to learn a new language (Businessy).

After that I took the hands-on lab on Google Android by Siarhei (Sergei) Dudzin. This worked like a charm and in 1.5 hours I got the feeling for what it takes to develop an application for a Google Android phone. What strikes me is the perfect documentation that Google has as compared to your average open source project. Of course they have the budget, but they really put in the effort.

The next one was about "five star projects" (Eric Bouwers, Software Improvement Group). Apparently there now exists an official certification for software maintainability by the German company TÜVit. This certification ranges from 3 stars to 5 stars. 1 star is rubbage. The SIG performs the investigation for TÜVit. Just as in education the accreditation institution is also seperated from the investigating institution.
The speaker demonstrated the metrics on several open source projects.

Java and Google App engine (Jettro Coenradie, JTeam) was the poorest talk from my perspective. Too little concepts and too much code and XML flashing by. "This is easy, this is just as easy, this is almost too easy to show." Apparently he had some other audience in mind than me.

But this was compensated for by the last talk on Google Wave (Jos Dirksen, Atos Origin). I'm already "waving" but this talk showed me a lot more features. Most people (including myself) start by using it as email, but it can do so much more. The big question at the moment seems to be how you want to use it once you've explored the many features.
Jos also showed how to build your own bots and gadgets. I hope I will have some experimentation time soon!

The best way to keep up is to get some firsthand experience. That's why I will be involved in a project running within our researchgroup "New Business & ICT" (lector H. Velthuijsen).

The project aim is to deliver an expert system which will make life easier for Light Mentally Handicapped (LMH) people. This expert system is to be connected to all sorts of sensors within their homes and to be monitored by their attendants. If it works out well the LMH will need less interaction with their attendants, which gives the LMH a more normal life.

The client in the project is the NOVO foundation (www.novo.nl). Avics (www.avics.nl) is a market party involved with a lot of sensor/home automation expertise. The results will be open sourced.

My exact role will crystalize in a few weeks.

Google wave

Saturday I had a party with my family in-law. Serge asked me whether I'd heard of "google wave" already. My interest was peaked and I checked it out on sunday evening on wave.google.com. I watched the entire 1h20 video of the demo at the google i/o conference.

There are two things I'd like to mention. First of all, I found the presentation pretty amateuristic. The presentation was pretty mediocre at some parts and the jokes were not really funny. How can I teach my students that they have to prepare decent presentations when even google's people don't do it? And the excuse "it was just a developer release" would be an insult to developers, I think. So I would have appreciated a 15 minute version with most of the chatter cut out.

But then the thing itself. Google Wave is a "communication and collaboration tool". In short, they set out inventing email as if they were inventing it today with all the technology at hand. But to say Wave is email, is not correct. It's like a combination of email, instant messaging, blogging, a photo site, wiki all in one. It integrates with your blog and your social network. You can collaborate with multiple people (demo was four) on a piece of text in real-time. It has playback functionality like walking through a revision history in source control. Etc. etc.

Google also thought about federation. This means companies will be able to set up their own wave-server and create wave-accounts just like you can do with mail. And open sourcing it after creating open API's means developers will be able to create extensions for waves at several levels (i.e. at product or protocollevel).

So did google succeed in impressing me? Yes! (Despite the crummy presentation :-)