The place is at the middle of the old Finlayson factory complex and brought back memories form the time I first started studying in Tampere 13 years ago. The building where the conference was located was exactly the same where I attended business english classes :)
The theme of the conference this year was "building the right thing" which is a great topic that has really been missing from the agile mindset for too long. I've often found myself wondring amidst projects: "Why should we strive for 90% test coverage or perfect Scrum-process if its not granted that the original requirements are sane?".
I'm not going to go through all the talks of the conference, instead I'm just going to pick a few topics and talks that inspired me the most.
Ideas
Lots of ideas were floating around. Lots of talking about how to turn ideas into business. By far the best talk was from Marko Taipale. Marko is a very inspiring talker with loads of real life hands-on experience. Also it was Marko's talk that again verified my own thoughts of how common and bountiful ideas are.
Everybody has ideas. Another talk given by Ralf Kruse really demonstrated this well. He managed to make the audience sputter out really cool ideas by the dozen during his speech that was more like a hands-on session on how to create the initial product backlog out of literally anything. He just picked up a random guy and demonstrated the daily routines in his life (an university student) and how really cool sounding business ideas can be spawned from just about any aspect of a persons life.
Being part of a small startup myself, I've had a lot of discussions about ideas. The traditional approach, and also some kind of natural instinct is to keep your ideas hidden. The reason for this is of course the fear that someone will steal your great idea. This, as I've come to realize, is nonsense. There are so many ideas everywhere that people and companies are drowning in them.
Back to Marko's presentation that was basically about explaining how do you iterate from a set of business ideas expressed in a standard format to a viable, scalable business. He laid out a very clear and simple method to follow. I loved the clarity in his thinking. Of course its not new stuff. Most of this has been introduced in the Lean Startup movement, but as with agile all in all, its one thing to know stuff and completely another thing to apply that knowledge successfully in the real world.
To me the lesson I took home from this was that ideas are good, they are the fuel that a startup needs. But you should not get stuck with your ideas. And most importantly, the ideas need to be put out there and tested for viability. My favourite quote from Marko was (sorry, might not be quoted correctly): "The facts are not inside your building."
As long as you just keep fiddling with stuff in your office, all you have are guesses. Personally I'm not down to coding stuff for months or a year just based on a guess. Not anymore at least.
Software artistry
This is a topic probably as old as software industry itself. I found Sam Aaron to be also an inspiring talker. He has basically (and very literally too) combined art and programming. He was a presentation with the title of "Hyper Agile" which made me chuckle. But basically his talk was about approaching programming from a old fashioned craftsmanship direction and building first your own tools that enable you to create beautiful and artful software for your personal pleasure.
I have mixed feelings about this. I have background in arts (music) and Sam's message appeals to that side of me. My pragmatic self wasn't that thrilled. The question that kept popping in my mind was: "How do you create larger software that requires coordinated efforts by a team or even several teams if every developer has their own "light saber" that is ever so slightly different from everybody else's?"
Still, I'm definitely going to try Sam's pet projects Emacs Live and Overtone he used to give a really cool live music performance with. Basically Emacs Live + Overtone seems to be a programmable sound interface that uses Clojure.
And that brings us to...
Clojure
Now I know I've already written about Clojure shortly and basically dismissed it. However I'm always willing to change my opinions in the light of new evidence, which was kindly provided by the very talented guys at Metosin. These guys were also sponsoring the event and providing some really fancy coffee (being allergic to caffeine, I can't give a better description, sorry).
The guys from Metosin showed me some production quality Clojure code from a Real Project, which was a first for me. Looking at their stuff briefly I was pleasantly surprised. It looked actually readable and not just clever guys being too clever for their own good (as seems to be the standard with Scala). Very much respect for this.
There's also a video in YouTube from these guys giving a demonstration on how to do stuff with Clojure and Eclipse, its here.
Soo, as for me, the jury is now back out to judge Clojure again. I installed a Clojure plugin to my IDEA and at least so far its looking rather nice. Still, I have to say that part of the reasoning to jump from Java to Clojure was based on arguments that are not that objective.
Let me explain. If you state that Clojure is better because it doesn't have a 7-level architecture with relational database, OR-mapping, Spring, Wicket and tons of other frameworks, I would argue that you've just decided to use all this crap with Java, but that's not the fault of Java itself. I have written quite a bit about frameworks vs. tools before and all that applies here.
The problem with Java isn't the language in my opinion. It has always been the culture and the fact that huge corporations like IBM and Oracle and SAP have ruined Java for everybody without a very clear vision on what NOT to use when doing stuff with Java.
I'm in the process of writing a multi-part article on how Java can be used to create just as light and flexible architectures. Stay tuned for those!
Still, I'm giving Clojure a go as I love to learn new stuff. You can expect a report on my adventures on this blog in the future!
Summary
I had tons of fun at TGA. The organisers were super cool and the speakers were all very good. Thanks for this amazing event!
Also shout outs to guys from Nitor Creations and all other colleagues I stumbled on. Looking forward to chances to work with all of you!
