Freekshow

Programming for kids

Freek Leemhuis — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:44:32 +0000

Some time ago I was running out of time for the Devnology codefest assignment to create my own Tetris clone. At the same time I was trying to spend some more time with my daughter, who is 8 years old now. She is sometimes very bored from school, which I sympathise with – I was the same at that age I guess. So I thought this would be a good time to try and see if she would be interested in programming. After some research on visual programming languages for kids I to give Scratch a go to see if we could build something together.
It took us very little time to get going, and in no time we had some of the build-in characters moving across the screen. Visual programming makes it relatively easy to grock some of the core concepts of programming. Loops, conditions, variables – you just drag them on a pane and they snap together.

We started out by discovering animation, and this is when something amazing happened. We added some animation logic while the app was running, and it changed its behavior while it was running.
I had a flashback to Alan Kay’s demo on TED – a powerful idea about ideas. If you’ve not seen it, go ahead and watch – it will be 20 minutes well spent.

Reading up on Scratch I found it is actually build on Squeak, an implementation of the Smalltalk language and environment.
After some goofing around we set off to create a simple tetris clone. Except tetris isn’t that simple, and with no means of testing or debugging, one quickly realises this is really an educational tool but not so good in producing something more complicated.
We did get sort of half-way, but it’s fair to say that by then neither of us was enjoying the experience very much.
I’m very impressed with Scratch as a tool for education young children, and it’s a real joy to see the thoughts and discoveries of your child click into place going through some of the basics. Some advice for other fathers: take it slow, one step at a time. After an hour or so trying to explain everyting, it turned out to be a lot to ask for from Hannah. ‘Can I play with my playmobile now daddy?’ Ofcourse you can, just wait while your daddy finishes this real simple tetris game…

Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies

Freek Leemhuis — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:34:28 +0000

I’ve followed Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister ever since I read Peopleware, a great book about building great software teams. When a new book by these authors (and a few others) came out last year, I ordered it straight away. It’s called Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies, and it’s a great list of patterns of project behaviour.
It’s a fun read, although I’m sure for some of my colleagues and former colleagues some of the stories are too close for comfort.
I’ll describe why a few of the patterns really resonated with me:

At one of my previous assignment there were a lot of procedures to follow. Using project management procedures like Prince2 really revolved around having the specified documents in place at certain to pass certain milestones. Usually, the templates for these documents have little descriptions here and there where information is required.At the start of a project, one had to fill in an document listing predefined architectural concerns and design decisions for the system to be delivered. In itself not a bad practice, but ofcourse only valuable if you put the right amount of detail and consideration into it. As a test, I filled in the template with completely inane comments to see who would pick up on it. Where it asked: what are the logging and tracing requirements for this application I wrote This application has no specific needs for logging and tracing other than standard.
Under the heading: what security concerns need to be adressed for the information contained in the database I wrote : the information needs to be authorized by the guidelines specified in the technical design (note: there was at that time no technical design document – this was to be delivered only in the next project phase). You get the picture. I filed the document and it passed with flying colours: all boxes where checked. In reality, it amounted to nothing.
This kind of behaviour is what DeMarco et al refer to as Template Zombies. If procedures are more about form than content, be very careful. The Template Zombies are out to get you.

The other pattern that lends it’s name to the book is one I deal with quite a bit: Adrenaline Junkies. You will find these people in organizations where priorities are constantly shifting to the project that is particular urgent at that time. A new project was about to start, and after calculating the manpower required to finish on time we concluded that a 4man team should start right away to have any chance of actually meeting the deadline. However, after confronting the project manager with this information, he looked at us stunned, and responded: `are you kidding me? There are 10 more projects that we need to work on before we start that one!’
And so we did not start until it was too late, and ofcourse the project was late like any other project they were doing.
This is the thing when you are dealing with Adraneline Junkies: they react rather than consider, and there is no long-time planning, and generally they confuse being very busy with being very productive. There is generally a lot of burnout and turnover at companies that follow this pattern. Junkie behaviour does not scale, and companies that fail to recognize it will struggle to make a long term impact.
Mind you, the book does not really go into detail on how to handle the situations it describes. It merely gives a name to patterns that are, unfortunately, rife in our industrie. When dealing with Adraneline Junkies I have made my mind up to avoid in particular one other pattern mentioned by DeMarco: I will not be a Film Critic. Go ahead and look that one up, and many other similarly apt named patterns.

Transfer news

Freek Leemhuis — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:42:19 +0000

Working for Logica as a consultant for the last three years has been quite a journey. For a number of reasons, (I won’t bore you with them here) I felt the need for a new challenge, and when the opportunity arose I decided to join IHomer. As of the 1st of November I will become the tenth participant of this group. Delighted as I am with this prospect, I am also sad to leave Logica. There’s some tremendously talented people there, and I have enjoyed my travels with you all.
I would like to express my gratitude to Logica, working with them has brought me many things and it´s been a great place to work.

One of the perks of working for IHomer is, obvious, working from home on a regular basis. I´m really looking forward to this, I´ve created a nice little home office and I´m sure I´ll see a lot more of my girls.

I have commited myself to deliver workshops for Logica later this year, so for my colleguaes: there´ll be opportunities to catch up.

On the nature of community driven events

Freek Leemhuis — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:45:47 +0000

Last week I was involved in organizing a Scala workshop, and from the feedback we received it was notable that some of the issues that were mentioned were more to do with the expectation of participants than with the actual content.The average rating from the evaluation for this event was 7.3 (on a scale from 1 to 10), and while that might seem decent it is dramatically lower then scores for our previous events.Some of the feedback that was provided was very fair. For example, it was mentioned that the tempo could have been higher, and it could have. The typical participants of Devnology meetings have way more smarts and passion about them than any other group I have participated in, so we need to become better at tailoring our meetings accordingly.

Another point of criticism we received was that the facilitators did not seem to know all the ins and outs of the subject matter. This in my opinion is a result of the position we take in organizing these types of events: there should not be one expert explaining to the rest everything there is to know, but rather a situation where there’s enough preparation done to go through the material, and in the process learn from each other.

Under these conditions, chances are a lot bigger that it will be an interactive event, with active participation.

This way, you get to know the attendees, learn what knowledge and experience they can contribute, possibly even beyond the event itself. The meetings will become more lively and interesting, and more in line with the ideas behind the Unconference.

Having an expert capable of explaining everything on a particular subject may not improve the experience, expecially if you lose a level of interaction. We will therefore continue to encourage members of the community to take on a subject and create a learning events that is geared toward learning together.

Obviously, this will only be a success if the more knowledgeable participants are aware of this and willing to share their skills and ideas. If you are aware of points being missed or if you have information or skills that can contribute, one way to react it to sit back and be bored. It might however be better to ask yourself this question: what have I done to improve the experience of this event for some (or all) of the other participants?

Let me paraphrase what this guy said:

Ask not what your community can do for you, ask what you can do for your community!

I don’t mean to sound obnoxious here and I certainly don’t want to put people off from attending. What I hope to achieve with this post is to make our viewpoints regarding these issues clear and hopefully prevent misunderstanding in the future.

Please feel free to respond!

DDD Course… coming to a theatre near you very soon!

Freek Leemhuis — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 07:23:26 +0000

There’s a great opportunity to immerse yourself for 2 days in Domain Driven Design. On the 14th and 15th of September Gregory Young will speak about the essentials of applying DDD concepts in the design and implementation of your application. This is a very practical, hands-on event. Places are limited, so sign up now at http://www.jworks.nl/

You can see Greg in action in this recent presentation at QCon

Speak up!

Freek Leemhuis — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:46:11 +0000

Lately I’ve been involved in a lot of workshops and meetings and one thing I noticed is that when a question is asked in a group of developers, it’s very often the younger attendants that reply first. Sometimes there’s a crop of bright young developers who really know their stuff, but other participants with years of experience just seem to be less vocal. In discussing this observation with a colleague last week it started to dawn on me: it’s not that the younger guys are brighter, they are less inhibited because they can still get away with an answering incorrectly.

If you have been a developer for 8 years or more, and someone asks an innocuous question (what is a function?), you probably know the answer. However, suppose you give the wrong answer, in front of a crowd of fellow programmers. Your reputation is on the line. Better keep quiet, and let the young guys go at it, right?

The best way to learn is to be wrong occasionally, even if it means being painfully wrong sometimes. As a programmer, there’s so many things that you ‘should know’ that it’s near impossible to have all this knowledge readily available. There’s never a better learning moment then these. Being painfully wrong means being wrong once. Being silent can mean being wrong many times. So, mainly as a reminder to myself: it’s ok to be wrong. It’s not okay to stop learning. As the lady says, sometimes you just have to feel the fear and do it anyway.

More DDD

Freek Leemhuis — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:12:58 +0000

The second part of the DDD workshop contained a modelling session (modelling out loud!), which I think helped a lot explaining some of the concepts.

I’ve attached the slides for the second day below.

ddd-day2 slide deck

Spreading the word

Freek Leemhuis — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 07:33:57 +0000

Eindhoven, 7th of april 2009, Workshop Domain Driven Design.

Smiles all around yesterday as each participant received a copy of the DDD bible. I think a few heads were spinning toward the end of the evening trying to take it all in. It is hard to cram a lot of the ideas in just a few hours, especially if there’s good discussion.

The slide deck can be found here, and the assignment here.

Second part on thursday, see you all there!

Code Fest 01

Freek Leemhuis — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:00:55 +0000

Some night that was! I was well impressed with the people that showed up, discussion and banter flowed between them based on a shared passion for technology and interest in other people’s approaches.

On this first Code Fest (all in Dutch, apologies) we had implementations of that old classic, James Conway’s Game of Life. On the night we had demonstrations of implementations in Flex, Erlang, Haskell, C++, Alloy, Java, CosMos and the Google App Engine. It certainly had my head spinning, and with what I thought was a cracking atmosphere we couldn’t have asked for more. We have invested a lot of time and energy in getting this thing of the ground, but yesterday evening alone was worth every bit of it.

Thanks all for a great evening.

On a sidenote, I was playing with this domain model to describe Devnology, and thought I’d share it here:

Geek as I am, it helps me focus and explain what I think we can achieve : Building a technology agnostic community by organising events that have high interaction between passionate developers. Enable interaction between academia and the software development industrie (software craftsmen, if you like).

With result like yesterday and the software testing event at TU Delft things are shaping up. Come and join us at our next meeting!

Devnology!

Freek Leemhuis — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:24:20 +0000

The cat is out of the bag! It’s been a long time in the making, but finally…. coming to a theatre near you very soon… It’s…..

Our first event is planned for the 1st of april (no joke, I promise) and is now open for registration. Do come!