Software, research, and leadership
WICSA was fun. I usually find the most I can hope for in a conference is 1 or 2 papers that are really interesting, but I think WICSA cleared 5, so it was well worthwhile. What I particularly enjoy about conferences is hearing how people verbally describe the ideas and challenges in the field. You …
Yesterday WICSA 2009 finished. There were a number of interesting talks over the three days of the conference. One was by Richard Taylor on Architectural Styles for Runtime Software Adaptation. He was discussing a framework (BASE) for comparing approaches to dynamic runtime adaptation. The model classifies how various architectural styles deal with Behavior, Asynchrony, State, …
How can you tell what the next big thing is going to be? Google’s pagerank algorithm will tell you what web pages have been important enough in the past for other people to have linked to. Google trends will tell you what search terms people have been using recently, again in the past. What …
After my PhD, I worked in industry on the verification and development of software for a safety-critical environmental control system. The project used a variety of tools and processes to improve and demonstrate product quality. However, the only static analysis tool being used was lint. I thought there had to be something better. As an …
At the drinks after Ivar Jacobson’s talk, I was speaking with a project manager from Honeywell who’s about to adopt a more agile development approach. Honeywell is in the industrial automation business – they do systems engineering to deliver solutions for things like building automation and factory process control. Their business context is one of …
On Monday I saw an entertaining and thought-provoking talk in Sydney by Ivar Jacobson, one of the inventors of UML. The talk was about agile development – what they don’t teach you in school. Ivar discussed the eternal problem of developing good software, quickly, at low cost. There’s a convergence happening between software engineering and …
Work has presented me with a small data manipulation exercise. That’s another opportunity to do some more scripting in F#! This time I’m processing some Comma-Separated Value (CSV) files. CSV files are one of the lowest forms of semi-structured data, used for representing a simple table of data textually. The basic idea is easy – …
The discussion earlier this year about the death of the blogosphere is surely exaggerated. OK, my blog was “resting” for most of this year. My excuse is general busy-ness – moving house, moving office, and changing roles at NICTA. But recently I had the enthusiasm and time to write a flurry of blog entries. (I’ve …
I had to miss the second day of ICSOC, but was back for the morning of the third, and another great keynote, on Web-Scale Computing, from Peter Vosshall – a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon. Amazon needs a highly reliable and scalable infrastructure internally to run its retail business, but has also been selling …
The 6th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing is on in Sydney this week. NICTA is a sponsor, and I managed to score a registration to attend. Ian Foster opened with an interesting keynote. (Preceded by a 30 minute delay fussing with Mac technology issues!) He spoke on “Services for Science” – how SOA is …