First 2 days of the Roundup done
The 2 first days of the roundup are done, and I am eager to start on the third. The first 2 days was just packed with information and discussion, a lot of viewpoints to take in and stuff to learn.
The trip over was rather long. It took me about 28 hours from getting out of bed until arriving at the Lupine house in Crested Butte. Worst part was not being able to sleep on the trip across the Atlantic, which took nearly 9 hours. And it was also frustrating to be really tired yet not getting to sleep properly through the night. The jet lag is still bad, but improving.
The first day was the alternative languages day, which I attended a session on Scala. There was a lot to take in, as it did not really start at the most basic level, but instead dived right into how to doing LINQ in Scala. It was pretty interesting still, as there where a lot of questions and I learned about the more advanced features of Scala. We also looked at Bill Venners scalatest code, and it looked like a nice concept for expressing tests. Dick Wall showed us some code from Navagenics which was useful for looking at more basic Scala code.
I went over to the chestnut house next to see if I help on anything on Bill Venners scalatest project, but I spent the entire time trying to get it to compile with the fast scala compiler, which for some reason doesn´t work properly on my computer. And the project doesn´t compile on the normal scala compiler either, due to high memory demands. So that was a bit off a miss. I should have brought my Linux laptop instead, because I really don´t feel home enough with the Mac for development.
Day 2 I attended a session on Developer Productivity and Technical Dept. The Developer Productivity explored many facets off what makes a developer productive, as well as how you measure productivity. It´s not really an easy problem to solve other than through peer review, as there generally are no good metrics to use. And any metric you implement is bound to get gamed by the developers anyways, to the detriment off the project.
Next we had the Technical Dept session, which was also really interesting. Here we also got into how you would measure it and how it relates to monetary debt. Technical debt we defined as code or architecture that limited and slowed down developer productivity. Each time the suboptimal code had to be touched or used, you pay interest on it through increased time use. However, you don´t always need to pay off you technical debt like normal debt. If the code is seldom used or changed, it just sits there and work, it´s not necessarily that efficient to fix the problems.
After this a bunch of us went out cross country skiing, which for my part involved a lot of falling down. I haven´t really done cross country before, but have done some downhill recently. But the principles I have learned from downhill really didn´t really translate to going down hills on cross country skis.
In the evening we went out for some great Thai food before attending the lightning talks. There was a bunch of interesting ones here as well, touching on a variety of topics, including Relativity Theory vs Quantum Theory and how we suck at seeing the color Blue.
After the lightning talks, Jet lag started to hit again, so I ended up back at the Lupine house and went to bed around 2300.