There’s such a thing as too much information (and too little sleep), so today i wasn’t at my sharpest. I think sitting next to the mother of all air conditioners yesterday wasn’t a good idea either.
Presentations i attended:
- Location based services: i more or less stumbled into this one because i didn’t know what to pick. Basically: a company called Navteq who offer services to convert coordinates (longitude – latitude) into maps, POI, routes, and similar GPS stuff. For developers who want to do location-sensitive mobile applications.
The one bit of useful info i got out of this: AGPS = GPS + mobile network. GPS is (as you know) triangulation with satellites, and the mobile network can help by triangulation with cellular antennas (so it even works indoors). Apparently this can be quite precise. - The most interesting presentation of the day for me: evolving agile by Scott Ambler of IBM. He criticized the developer-centric approach of some agile developers, and gave some advice as how to make agile more effective and more in tune with the rest of the organization.
I took some notes and i intend to show the Parleys presentation to my boss (who smirks at all things agile). - (lunch was actually pretty vile)(i skipped one presentation after that to catch up on some real work)(but i regret missing the OSGi presentation – hurry Parleys)
- Test-driven development by Lasse Koskela: pretty good too – i didn’t realize how fundamentally different test-driven development is, and the demo brought it home for me.
Summary: make a test that fails (but compiles), then make it pass (quick-and-dirty, hard-coding allowed), and then refactor. I’ll have to try.