Anyway it will be great fun and many cool college's, so looking very much forward to it.

My new blog is at at http://cre8ivethought.com/blog/index come and follow me there.

-Mark Nijhof

Many have already blogged about it, and Scott probably described it in the best, but NDC was truly amazing this year. And I was very happy that I was able to speak at such a great conference. This was the first time that I was able to do so in such a big setting and it was extremely cool as well as a bit scary. I had two talks scheduled, one about FubuMVC and another one about Test-Driven JavaScript Development was added later.

I learned a lot!

I have had a nice number of presentations before, most of them for our local NNUG and 2 for the European Virtual Alt.Net (E-VAN), but in such a professional setting I did get a bit nervous. Thanks fully because of the stoplight I couldn’t actually see the people laughing at me, to be honest for all I know there was nobody sitting there.

Then of course the presentation that I was worried most about, the Test-Driven JavaScript one, because of the life coding went the best. My FubuMVC talk on the other hand failed miserably because I couldn’t access my code examples in my VM which cut my talk in half. I also learned that my Mac actually doesn’t pick the largest resolution on its own, something it seems to do on other occasions; so silly me thought that the max resolution at NDC was 800 by 600. I could sure have used the extra pixels in my Test-Driven JavaScript talk. Also I should repeat questions as they are unbearable for the rest of the audience as well as on the recording.

Test-Driven JavaScript

In this talk my goal was to demonstrate as real as possible what it would be like to Test Drive your JavaScript Development, and to help you see that there really isn’t any reason why not to develop in this manner. And because of that I did not rehearse the actual coding exercise till perfection. I mean I know it was possible to do what I wanted, but I wanted to show the whole thinking about what to do as well, not just paste in pieces of code. Because that would not have been anywhere close to actual development. So needless to say I ran in a few small issues, but thankfully nothing that I couldn’t solve and if anything this was as real as it gets. So I am happy with this one. You can see the Test-Driven JavaScript recording here and also all the other recordings from NDC2010 here (well they will be there shortly, amazing how many they already made available).

How do I get started?

So after you have seen the recording and gotten all excited about Test Driving your JavaScript Development but you don’t really know where to go from here. Here is a small list of recourses and stuff that have helped me.

• All the original code for my website (which my demo was based upon) can be found on my GitHub account. This includes the JSpec specs as well as the Cucumber specs. The JSpec specs are in /public/jspec/unit/ where the page (Dom.html) that executes it is located one level higher. The JavaScript file under test is in /public/javascripts/ and the page containing it all is /public/index.htm.
• My actual website, so you can see the results, and also the JSpec specs and the JSLint output.
• JSpec is the JavaScript testing framework of my choice
• The slightly adjusted Dom.html page that includes a timer to facilitate the continuous testing.
• My own addition to better deal with animations, as the JSpec library doesn’t really threat these correctly.
• JSLint is a cool tool to get rid of smaller syntax errors and check the code quality.
• My JSLint execution page, not very special, but hey here it is.

Questions?

If you have any questions, then please let me know, I am more then happy to help where I can.

Heroku offers a unique way of deploying your Ruby web applications, you push them!

git push heroku master

Even do it is the first thing you see when visiting the site I still want to walk you through the process of setting up Heroku and deploying your Ruby application.

1. $ sudo gem install heroku
2. $ heroku create <your application name>
3. $ git push heroku master
4. $ open http://<your application name>.heroku.com/

Oh did I mention yet that the initial plan is free? Free as in you don’t have to pay anything! Of course when your application starts to attract visitors and you need more performance then you will need to start paying. But you have full control over this and I believe you can push it pretty far.

There are also many addons that you can enable (for some you need to pay for some not) providing a lot of functionality.

Now this looks like a commercial, but until someone told me about it I didn’t know, so now I am telling you. If you are doing some playing around or are actually working on a serious project. If it is in Ruby then this is worth checking out.

They are also offering some beta Node.js support!

More Ruby and other web stuff coming soon!

I am currently working / playing with the following:

• Ruby
• Sinatra, because I want to actually learn Ruby and not just Rails
• Haml
• Sass
• Compass
• jQuery, lots of it
• CouchDB
• MongoDB
• Cucumber
• RSpec
• QUnit
• JsTestDriver
• RubyMine, still in the evaluation time, but looks promising

I can tell you that there is a lot of new stuff here for me, and the list keeps on growing, so very exciting, very exciting indeed.

European Virtual Alt.Net (E-VAN)

I am proud to have been asked to join the Software Craftsmanship discussion together with Robert C. Martin and David Starr on E-VAN which in case you have missed it you can listen to it here: http://europevan.blogspot.com/2010/04/recording-of-discussion-on-software.html

XP 2010 in Trondheim

XP 2010 will be held in Trondheim from 1st of June till the 4th of June and _two_ of my lightning talk suggestions have been selected. I am looking very much forward to this day, lightning talks are new to me and I expect to gain a lot of insights.

5 Practices of a Software Craftsman (in the Personal Development track)

One of the principles of software craftsmanship is continuous improvement; i.e. the importance of keeping their knowledge up-to-date and to keep improving and expanding their skill sets. But one of the problems is that is can be hard to get started, what is a good approach, and where does one start?

Test Driven Spikes (in the Knowledge and Innovation track)

Creating spike code is often seen as an exercise purely for exploring unknown territory and that any resulting code should be thrown away right after finding the solution. I am proposing to drive these spikes through tests; this brings an easy way to execute the code, but more importantly the code and tests created can be used instead of thrown away.

NDC 2010 in Oslo

From 16th of June till the 18 of June I’ll be in Oslo for NDC 2010 and if it is anything like last year then this is also something to look forward to. This time it will be held in the city, so that means an even more interesting for Speaker Stalkers then last year.

FubuMVC

FubuMVC is an open source framework for web development using the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern. FubuMVC is built in C# and depends on the System.Web.Routing subsystem of the base CLR, but has no dependency on the ASP.Net MVC framework. In this talk I will highlight the architectural design of FubuMVC, how it works and more importantly the reasoning behind it. I will not make this into a comparison match with ASP.NET MVC, but there are so many interesting patterns being used in the FubuMVC code base that in its self should make this a very interesting talk. The FubuMVC code base has been an example for many others even in different areas outside of web development.

Speaker Stalker

Speaker Stalker is a pattern that I came up with at QCon London. Dan North gave the book “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” away (with many of the authors signatures) for the best conference pattern. I won by proving it was an actual established pattern :)

The example application

In an earlier post I mentioned that I was going to write an example application using FubuMVC and CQRS, but I am afraid that that has been put on hold for a while. Too many other things to give this a good effort, so then it is better to wait with it. Sorry about that.

My new blog is at at http://cre8ivethought.com/blog/index come and follow me there.

-Mark Nijhof

I have initiated many changes throughout my career, I have for example lived and worked in Holland (duh I am Dutch, so yeah), Norway and Australia. I have worked as a consultant going to clients, and I have worked in-house doing product development. I have even been working as a responsible person for designing and implementing large scale systems using the companies existing building blocks without daily coding.

People tell me that I have been lucky to have been able to do all of these things, but it is not luck, it is about embracing the opportunities that come along in life. All of these changes came from nice opportunities that later proved the be great. But it takes faith and trusting your instincts, and yeah a big leap of faith.

Well that time has come again, I am going to take a leap of faith:

www.Cre8iveThought.com 

I am going to be working for myself. This is been something that has been on my mind for a very long time, and I feel that now is the time to do it. I am actively initiating change.

I eventually want to be asked to initiate change in your development teams, helping them improve their skills and processes. I am a strong believer of continuous improvement, or kaizen and I have always enjoyed teaching others and seeing them just suddenly ‘get it’.

Another thing I will be doing is just delivering quality software, whatever is needed. I enjoy writing software immensely and that is something that won’t ever change.

So if you are in need of a person that is able to do any of the above mentioned things then I can be your man. Don’t hesitate to contact me on my e-mail Mark.Nijhof@Gmail.com or on my phone: 0047 95 00 99 37.

My statement is that the Ubiquitous Language in Domain-Driven Design is not Ubiquitous.

Lets first look at the definition of ubiquitous: Being present everywhere at once. Hmm that sounds a bit vague; here is a definition of ubiquitous language: A language structured around the domain model and used by all team members to connect all activities of the team with the software. Ah that is better. So the ubiquitous language is a common language shared by the domain experts, developers and the code.

But it is not a common language throughout all of the domain and code, this is one of the reasons why we have different bounded contexts. Because the same language may mean different things to different domain experts. Think for example about a shipping company, the meaning of the word ship is completely different when talking to accounting versus maintenance. For accounting a ship is an asset that degrades in value over time, but for maintenance a ship is an object that needs service every x nautical miles.

The same word has a different meaning when used in a different context, that is not ubiquitous.

Lets continue the small example, domain experts from maintenance also talk about an engine and rotor blades. But the domain expert in accounting don’t use these words at all, they have no meaning to them.

Some words even have no meaning at all when used in a different context, this as well is not ubiquitous.

So the Ubiquitous Language is only Ubiquitous within a given Context. What do you think?

NNUG Bergen

If you would like to join us, then please register yourself here: Registration form and (eventually) more information

We are also inviting some QCon speakers to spice things up a little bit, more details on that as well as the actual location will follow later.

So far the following speakers have accepted the invite:

• Corey Haines
• Udi Dahan
• Ayende
• Dan North
• Jon Skeet

So if you are at QCon London _or_ just in London and like to join us, then please do so! It will be fun!

My new blog is at at http://cre8ivethought.com/blog/index come and follow me there.

-Mark Nijhof

Many have already blogged about it, and Scott probably described it in the best, but NDC was truly amazing this year. And I was very happy that I was able to speak at such a great conference. This was the first time that I was able to do so in such a big setting and it was extremely cool as well as a bit scary. I had two talks scheduled, one about FubuMVC and another one about Test-Driven JavaScript Development was added later.

I learned a lot!

I have had a nice number of presentations before, most of them for our local NNUG and 2 for the European Virtual Alt.Net (E-VAN), but in such a professional setting I did get a bit nervous. Thanks fully because of the stoplight I couldn’t actually see the people laughing at me, to be honest for all I know there was nobody sitting there.

Then of course the presentation that I was worried most about, the Test-Driven JavaScript one, because of the life coding went the best. My FubuMVC talk on the other hand failed miserably because I couldn’t access my code examples in my VM which cut my talk in half. I also learned that my Mac actually doesn’t pick the largest resolution on its own, something it seems to do on other occasions; so silly me thought that the max resolution at NDC was 800 by 600. I could sure have used the extra pixels in my Test-Driven JavaScript talk. Also I should repeat questions as they are unbearable for the rest of the audience as well as on the recording.

Test-Driven JavaScript

In this talk my goal was to demonstrate as real as possible what it would be like to Test Drive your JavaScript Development, and to help you see that there really isn’t any reason why not to develop in this manner. And because of that I did not rehearse the actual coding exercise till perfection. I mean I know it was possible to do what I wanted, but I wanted to show the whole thinking about what to do as well, not just paste in pieces of code. Because that would not have been anywhere close to actual development. So needless to say I ran in a few small issues, but thankfully nothing that I couldn’t solve and if anything this was as real as it gets. So I am happy with this one. You can see the Test-Driven JavaScript recording here and also all the other recordings from NDC2010 here (well they will be there shortly, amazing how many they already made available).

How do I get started?

So after you have seen the recording and gotten all excited about Test Driving your JavaScript Development but you don’t really know where to go from here. Here is a small list of recourses and stuff that have helped me.

• All the original code for my website (which my demo was based upon) can be found on my GitHub account. This includes the JSpec specs as well as the Cucumber specs. The JSpec specs are in /public/jspec/unit/ where the page (Dom.html) that executes it is located one level higher. The JavaScript file under test is in /public/javascripts/ and the page containing it all is /public/index.htm.
• My actual website, so you can see the results, and also the JSpec specs and the JSLint output.
• JSpec is the JavaScript testing framework of my choice
• The slightly adjusted Dom.html page that includes a timer to facilitate the continuous testing.
• My own addition to better deal with animations, as the JSpec library doesn’t really threat these correctly.
• JSLint is a cool tool to get rid of smaller syntax errors and check the code quality.
• My JSLint execution page, not very special, but hey here it is.

Questions?

If you have any questions, then please let me know, I am more then happy to help where I can.