Speaker: Matt Brasier, Principal Consulting LTD
Speaker/company background: Non-functional requirements.

Matt’s philosophy:
• Good understanding is the best performance/tuning tool
• Common & open source tools
• Observe, hypothesize, tweak, test
• Trust no-one

He goes on to describe three case studies, which demonstrate how he puts this philosophy in practice.

Matt’s slides (which also outline the case studies) are available here.

The key message for me is the application of systematic analysis, hypothesis formulation and testing. This can, in fact, be described as a scientific approach, which gets a big thumbs up from me.

A second key message was the high value of a centralized repository of problems/solutions. This is apparently what Matt’s company has set up, and the repository now represents significant intellectual capital for the company.

Summary: I found Matt’s didactic style a tad dry and bullet-pointy; but all in all the substance made up for this and for that the talk was indeed worthwhile.

Expectations are high as Thought Works’ Neil Ford takes to the stage. The title of his keynote: Predicting the Future

Neil wants to advise us how to avoid becoming IT-dinosaurs… and I have to confess I’ve chuckled at the occasional COBOL-developer joke on more than one occasion. So I’m all ears!

Yes, we’re bad at predicting future outcomes. Neil cites the classic Monty Hall problem, which shows human ineptitude when it comes to evaluating conditional probabilities.

Talking about paradigm shifts, he cites the iPhone, and notes that the big hit applications have generally exploited not just the device itself, but have combined numerous features of the iPhone platform.

He notes that Moore’s law can no longer by relied upon to give us a doubling in app performance over an 18 month period, and that WE – the developers – will need to achieve greater parallelism in our software if we are to profit from multicore processors.

Functional languages have an important contribution to make here (names Haskell, Scale, Clojure, F# as examples) as they to not suffer from (or are less susceptible to) synchronization and locking issues, which is what makes thread-programming in languages such as Java so difficult to get right. IN particular, Ford names Clojure as a potentially exciting intersection between dynamic and function languages in the sense that it gets the best of both worlds.

We are then reminded that warfare is frequently a source of (destructive) innovation; and are then advised to heed the warnings of Dick Feynman (physics genius, communicator and contributor to the Manhattan project) and George Orwell (author of 1984 and prophet of pervasive government surveillance).

[So where are we going with all this Neil? It'll be killer robots next!]

Well… there you go.

Now here’s an interesting prediction from Ford: Apple to become the world’s biggest bank. It’s true: The iPhone has increasingly shown it’s ability to generate huge turnovers via micro-payments.

The final quote in this quote-heavy keynote comes from from management guru Peter Drucker: „Best way to create the future is to create it.“

Summary: Neil’s got the gift of the gab and he’s a role model for effective presentation style (bullet-point suckers take note). However, on this occasion his chosen collection of weighty quotes and iconic images did not quite add up to a the kind of coherent narrative on “Predicting the Future” I would have liked. As for how to avoid my own dinosaurification: I’m gonna build me a killer robot!!!

This week some of Canooies had the privilege visiting one of Basel University’s physics research laboratories. There we were given a fascinating tour of the lab by its head Professor Martino Poggio. Prior to entering the lab Martino described some of the theory behind the lab’s principal focus, which is Nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging.

What we encountered was a world of extremes. The techniques Martino and his team are developing may one day give us accurate 3D images of entire molecules, such as proteins. To obtain view of such tiny entities, samples are placed on miniscule springboards, the length of which substantially less than the width of a human hair!

If that weren’t challenging enough, measurements need to take place at temperatures approaching absolute zero – that’s a chilling minus 270°C!

Many thanks Martino for providing us with some fascinating insights into your cutting-edge experiments!

For more information on the lab’s work, check out Martino’s site here.

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Marc Hermann (Canoo) and Guenter Losert (Canoo)

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Per Junel (Canoo) and Martino

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Some happy “students”

Fun and great feedback following Mike and Dierk’s talk at JavaOne; Sun asks for a repeat performance!

As previously announced, Dierk and I held a talk at JavaOne today (actually Dierk held no less than TWO talks – there’s just no stopping this guy!) The title of our over-subscribed session was “Going Mobile with JavaFX Script Technology, Groovy and Google Android” and in addition to an eager and informed public, we were honoured to have some of JavaFX’s and Android’s champions and contributors in the audience.

We took the first few moments of the session to emphasize one of Canoo’s core value propositions: The discernment of hyperbole from reality. Indeed, much of my part of the talk concerned the current
status of JavaFX Script (scheduled official release in June 08) and how it does not (yet) live up to many of the claims being made about it.

Unsurprisingly, our statements concerning the immature status of functionality and tooling in JFX were not met with silence. And in a delightfully spontaneous moment at the end of the talk we invited
James Weaver to join us on stage for what amounted to a mini panel session.

James’ main point was that JFX makes rich client development significantly easier than, say, with Swing, and that this can only be good for the Java platform. Of course, we don’t disagree with this
statement. But where differences in opinion remain is (a) in the use of the word “significantly”; and (b) in our level of confidence regarding whether or not JavaFX Script will succeed in a market, where
competition is tough, well-established, and only getting tougher by the week. JFX’s current deficiencies (which we talked about in some detail) of course only reduce its chances of success.

So what’s our primary take-home based on the feedback we got directly after the talk and at the Canoo booth? That a level-headed and unbiased opinion on a given technology is what the majority of
conference attendees are looking for. And who are these attendees? Quite simply: Real people representing real companies who serve real customers, who nevertheless enjoy being inspired by examples from the cutting edge, such as our MusicPinboard JavaFX and Mobile Shopping Android applications.

Finally, to top off all the great feedback, Sun asked us to repeat the session this coming Friday!!! So if you didn’t catch us the first time around, we’d be thrilled to see you in hall 302 of the Moscone Center at 13:30.

Thanks to everyone who did attend for coming and for the positive feedback!