Hello dear readers,

I’m delighted to say that I will be speaking at the inaugural Lean Agile Scotland conference in September. I’ll be evangelising about Continuous Delivery to the best and brightest in the industry and I would encourage you to get a ticket while they are available.

If you send me a mail/tweet I’ll send you a 10% discount code I have to further entice you.

I’ve watched the Olympics on television over the years and always felt entirely detached from the athletes performing. Unlike most other televised sports like Basketball, Football or Cricket, there aren’t many twists or turns. The 800m starts with 8 participants, one of them will finish first, then second and so on… you already know what’s going to happen, the only variation is whether one of the first three atheletes happened to be born in an NHS hospital or not.

Now I find myself crying tears of joy, and whooping with delight at another Team GB medal. How has this happened?

The difference between this Olympics from previous events is that the television coverage has changed, you are given a mini biography of how each performer has overcome adversity and trained for hours each day for this event, you get to see their family members and see the pride that they have. Then when you see the athlete finish, you see the delight or sorrow on their faces, you are emotionally invested in the performer.

You get given this emotional rollercoaster every 15 minutes, with the protagonists and event changing every day for two weeks. It’s the greatest show on earth.

I recently gave a talk at Scot Ruby Conf 2012 in Edinburgh on Continuous Delivery. I’ll link here when the video is up.

The idea that inspired me most at the conference was the concept of using Hexagonal Architecture.

Eight days ago I felt very ill. I had a headache, a fever and no desire for food. I knew what was coming… three weeks before that my son had contracted chicken pox while at nursery, for him it was pretty mild as it is in most children, sadly for adults it’s severe.

The progress of chicken pox is small spot, large spot, fluid filled blisters, scabbed, or in medical terms:

On the Sunday I had a few small spots, the symptoms weren’t too bad in the morning but by the afternoon my joints all started to hurt and the fever took over. It was at this point I hit the Ibuprofen. People seem to think that the spots are itchy, the real problem is that they are painful. It’s like having your face tortured, I just wanted to remove my skin.

The worst problem was some spots that were infected in my scalp and on back of my neck. Following a phone call to my doctor I was giving anti-biotics, this cleared the pain and the infected spots very quickly. Before this having a shower was agony.

By the second day of the spots erupting I hadn’t eaten anything much for three days. This is because you lose your appetite and the spots develop inside your throat meaning it’s painful to eat. I ended up fainting and scaring the crap out of my wife who had to revive me.

By day 3 I had hundreds of spots all over my head and body. You can see my looking unhappy above. The days after they spread to my lower body and hands. The more annoying spots were on my eye lids (leaking into my eyes), ear canal, inside throat, armpit, soles of feet and on my fingertips.

This is me today (below), 7 days after the first spots appeared. It’s a lot better as at this point as the pain has subsided from the spots, now it’s a constant battle to stop from scratching all the scabbed spots leaving a scar:

At this point my 4 hourly cocktail of drugs includes anti-histamines, cocodamol and an anti-biotic. That’s what keeps me smiling (as not seen above).

In Australia, the US and Canada every child is immunised against chicken pox. If you have a kid, do everything you can to make sure they get the mild version when they are a child; you really don’t want this as an adult.

For the first time the runaway success that has been the Startup Weekend movement is coming to Glasgow on 25-27th May.

From the official site:

I would encourage any developer, web designer, student, ideas person or artist to go along and get a feel for what it takes to get a simple pitch built up into a minimum viable product with a team over a high intensity weekend. I’ll be attending as a coach at the event. I’ve enjoyed plenty of these events before as an attendee and organiser so I’m looking forward to trying out the coaching role.

See more details for the Glasgow event here, which is being organised by Michael Hayes of Rookie Oven fame