I was approached by Adrian Mowatt and Rob Lally from AgileScotland about the prospect of getting involved with a whole day coding event in Glasgow. I eagerly joined these two pioneers and we are happy to announce the first Coding Retreat in the UK.

We will be getting 20 keen software developers together in a room, putting them in pairs and seeing what they can achieve in 40 minutes. Every 40 minutes the pairs change and we start again.

We have selected the Ruby programming language to be used by pairs on the day.

It’s happening on Saturday the 21st November 2009 at Glasgow Caledonian University from 9am to 5pm. Tickets are completely free and available from EventBrite.

We’ll be providing breakfast and lunch as well as drinks throughout the day. After 5pm we full intend to retire to a nearby watering hole.

We are limited to 20 people. So please sign up quickly as we won’t be able to increase the amount of tickets!

To get around this, and encourage me to blog further, I’ve created a new site Joejag Tech which will allow me to talk about unixy, ruby goodness without confusing my parents.

I’ll mainly be posting short articles on how to solve specific problems. Occasionally I might go over a code kata in detail as well.

After my talk is over I’ll put it up online. But for now I’ve put up a page about the project for those interested in what I’ve been doing with 1.5 years of Thursday.

On the way over to Antwerp from Glasgow I was amused by an old lady who when told she couldn’t have pie and beans on the plane promptly asked for a stick of rock and a cheese sandwich instead. I’m with her on the unhealthy plane meals revolution! I later arrived at Antwerp train station which is probably the most impressive train station I’ve ever seen. While still in UK mode I then hailed a taxi and tried to get into the passengers side for UK cars (which is the drivers seat in Europe). After convincing the driver that I didn’t want to steal his vehicle I then told him where I needed to go. He struck me with a confused look, asked if I was sure, then pointed to my hotel straight across the road. Kudos to him for not driving me around town then dropping me off at the same spot.

I chose the flights and the hotel myself (on JPMs dime) so I only have myself to blame for the hotel I chose. After quickly figuring out that the locals in Antwerp do not speak French or English and that I’ve never wanted to learn Dutch in my life, I realised this was going to get complicated. I arrived to my room after walking over a patch of dried blood. Luckily enough the tv had UK channels so I was able to watch the news and football in my room. It was around this time that the incessant knocking began. I had somehow booked a hotel which was also a Leprechaun retirement home. Every pipe in the building seemed to have a steady knocking sound like someone was hitting it with a hammer.

When I go abroad I use the same suitcase which was a corkscrew, a photocopy of my passport and some coins. I have now figured out that there is another thing I’m missing….a power converter. I wasted a lot of time going round stores in Antwerp unsuccessfully looking for a UK->Euro converter. My hotel unsurprisingly didn’t have one so I resorted to asking randoms if I can charge my iPhone off their USB ports (not cool).

The conference itself was a 3 day affair for me. It was hosted at a purpose built cinema/exhibition hall at the North of Antwerp which was easily accessible from the brilliant and cheap Tram system. All the big players in the Java space were there (including MS touting their Silverlight tech) and offering assorted goodies to get you to visit their stalls. The badge you got had an optional RFID tag which you could use at vendor booths to give your details over. It was also used to show you how full each room was and with what nationality. There were over 3000 attendees but only 100 were from the UK. Holland and Belgium by far had the largest mindshare, though everyone was speaking English (go old empire!)

Each day there were 6 timeslots for talks and you had a choice of different talks to attend. At the end of each day there would be free beer and games like fussball/wii. I really enjoyed going to Devoxx but I can’t say that I’d like to go to a conference alone again. I’d talk to someone who was sitting next to me at the start but you were always going to a different talk after and you’d never see them again! This was more difficult in the evenings as I had to go to restaurants alone (something I’ve never done before). Since I didn’t have any command of Dutch, I frequented Italian restaurants as I could still remember my tourist Italian from our Honeymoon to Florence.

One close call I had was when I got into the rhythm of asking the person next to me if they had been to a Java conference before and what talks they were excited about. I was about to do this during Brian Goetz’s concurrency talk but the talk started just as I was about to ask the same line of questions to the middle aged bloke sitting next to me. During the Q&A part of Brian’s talk the bloke next to me and put up his hand. Brian Goetz then said “Ah, I see Joshua Bloch has a question”. That’s right, I was about to ask the Chief Java Architect at Google if he had been to a conference before. Apart from writing large parts of the Java language, the guy was doing the keynote speech the next day!

A nice touch at the conference was the Whiteboards spread around the entrance. They had questions asking for your opinion on upcoming Java features and what people are working with today. I couldn’t resist helping start a TopGear-esque Cool Wall. The results are available online now from the devoxx site.

If you work in an Industry where you need to get training every now and again which usually costs around a grand. Ask your boss if instead of going on the exorbitantly priced training course, you would like to use around 3/4 of the same cash to go to a foreign country and have a great time (while learning!). It worked for me anyway.

Scrabble has rules to abide by, such as no hypenated words (good bye Eric Djemba-Djemba) and due to the English character set we can’t have any accentated letters (goodbye the otherwise similarly fantasticly named winner Francisco Jiménez Tejada)

So here goes, the official best scrabble surnames for any player ever to have played in the English Premier League (one player allowed per letter for better distribution/bad code):

1. Kuszczak -> 36
2. Mazzarelli -> 30
3. Tramezzani -> 30

But wait! None of those names can be created using the letters available in the Scrabble set. So ignoring these heathens we are given:

1. Khizanishvili -> 35
2. Bozinovski-> 28
2. Warzycha -> 28
4. Djorkaeff -> 27

So there you have it folks, all hail ex-Ger Zurab Khizanishvili, a Scrabble scoring god.

It was good to meet other people outside of the financial world who are using Java. In Glasgow the 3 big financial services probably employ over 2000 devs. So a substantial mindshare is dedicated to Trader focused development (glorified Excel). I often find myself wishing I could work on something which is available to the outside world.

After the talk a few prizes were up for grabs. Personal IntelliJ liceneses were the top prize (I’m lucky enough to already have one) though I managed to swag a free tshirt and a USB stick. JUGS also give you the opportunity to review O’Reilly books before they hit print. I would have quickly taken them up on this offer if I didn’t already have millions of books to read already!

Often when meeting people I am asked how long I have lived in Glasgow and where else I have lived. As I have lived at about 15 different addresses this is a rather difficult question to answer. So behold the answer!

The Google Map of Joe

When I first joined I had just finished my Masters degree from Aberdeen so was noticably wet behind the ears to how programming in the real world worked (despite a few summers spent working for local companies). The biggest difference by miles between Uni coding and real coding is the testing strategy. Uni is mainly about getting it to work in ideal circumstances. Real world coding is more about failing gracefully and testing every line of your code.

Apart from the that, learning new libraries and frameworks provides a steep learning curve. The main difference between working in teams at Uni and the real world is that teams at work are a lot more competent and have different skill sets.

After embarking on this journey I decided I need a new challenge using an agile management style. Randomly I received an email from an agency asking me when I would be available to interview for a job using agile techniques, java and unix (my three favourite developer tools). This as well as being based around the corner from where I currently work in Glasgow. After pondering over this I sent an email saying I was interested.

I guess I’m a bit odd because I really enjoy job interviews. I guess it’s the whole no longer being in education anymore so no more exams to sit mentality. The job interview itself was very stressing, I’ve done lots of revision for the official Java exam so I felt confortable with any questions they could ask me similar to those exams. They however were not using the same script!

They asked me about my last project I worked on and how I contributed. My last project involved creating an entire framework for future applications so it was easy to enthuse about. They proceeded to then attack the design of the system to see if I was aware of how it worked. Questions like “How would you improve the system?” also caught me offguard. I’ve been very happy with the system I was working on so I couldn’t think of any obvious way to improve it. When pushed I agreed that the EJB part we used isn’t with current trends.

This project based questioning was then followed by an oral technical test. Personally I thought the JCP questions were a little obscure but showed understanding of how the language actually works. The questions from my interview would blow the JCP out of the water. Somehow I managed to come across quite well. Though the questions based around the newish Java 1.5 I was quite sketchy on.

Half way through this process the gods shined on me allowing me to get an unfair advantage over my fellow interviewees….

The firealarm goes off!

This extended my interview by another 30 minutes or so allowing me to get all my geeky questions in and questions about the culture in the company (they have a pool table and playstations!). This allows me to find out over 650 developers work in the building. Recently I was seeing if there was any interest in Glasgow to start a Java Users Group (JUG), at this point I figured there are about 30 Java developers in Glasgow, maybe 100 across the central belt of Scotland. Turns out this company has 450 Java developers in their building alone. This massive group of developers is what made me really want the job, I could never learn everything they know.

One thing that has struck me as the best way to know if you are getting better at something is to look back at what you did a year ago. For the last 6 years I’ve been able to look back at my code and laugh each time. If one year I can’t do that then I know I’m doing something wrong. This is one factor to why I decided to move on, I need the constant challenge.

I’m off to France on Monday for a week to Nice (and yes I hope it will be nice). Then on the 17th I’ll be starting at JP Morgan. Having read the blog of my new team lead I can tell this is going to be hard. One of my soon to be colleagues is writing a book on improving techinical management practices. I’ve got a lot of learning to do.

And in other news…. I hope you’ve all heard the Mark Ronson remix of Radiohead’s Just?

Ah memories and great tunes redone.