Notes from YOW! 2013: Jeff Paton on ‘Safety Not Guaranteed: How Successful (Agile) Teams Ignore the Rules to Create Successful Products’

I attended Day 1 of YOW! Sydney 2013 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

Two people dressed as crash test dummies with their thumbs up. Does following Agile processes to the letter mean your team will be safe and succeed?Jeff Paton (@jeffpaton) is an independent consultant, teacher and Agile coach, and (I believe someone said) the inventor of Story Mapping. He spoke at YOW! about ‘Safety Not Guaranteed: How Successful Teams Ignore the Rules to Create Successful Products’.

Jeff started his talk by announcing that he hated agile development since the moment he first heard of it, but went on to explain that he doesn’t really hate agile now and that an important part of this has been to learn to pay a lot of attention to what he’s doing. Continue reading

Notes from YOW! 2013: Jeff Hawkins on ‘Computing Like the Brain: The Path to Machine Intelligence’

I attended Day 1 of YOW! Sydney 2013 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

A visual repesentation of machine intelligence as an incandescent brain with digital inputs and outputsKeynote, Day 1: Jeff Hawkins spoke about “Computing Like the Brain: The Path to Machine Intelligence

Jeff is an entrepreneur (he invented this slightly popular thing called the Palm Pilot) and scientist who co-founded Grok (formerly Numenta) to build technology based on theories of how the neocortex of mammalian brains works. Continue reading

Does Scala == Effective Java?

From the archive: Originally written in January 2011, this post from my old blog, Graham Hacking Scala, has been consistently popular ever since and I thought it deserved a new lease on life here…

'Effective Java (2nd Edition)' by Joshua Bloch. Many of its suggestions are redundant if coding in Scala.I started reading Joshua Bloch’s Effective Java last week. I’ll have to admit that I haven’t read it before, but only because I’ve been told by several people, “you already do most of what’s in there anyway.” Seeing as we tell all the new recruits to read it, I thought I should actually flip through it myself so I know what’s in there.

Books of best practices are always written in relation to domains that have many possibilities for bad practices (choosing otherwise would make for a very short book). Reading the first chapter of Effective Java, I was amused as I realised that, if you’re coding in Scala instead of Java, many of the book’s recommendations are either unnecessary, because Scala doesn’t permit the corollary bad practice, or built into the language of Scala, or made easier to implement than they are in Java. This isn’t a criticism of the book, but an observation that the state of the art is moving on, and Java is being left behind.

From the first 25 items in the book, here are my notes on practices that either become easier to follow or unnecessary if you are using Scala: Continue reading