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Last week me and guys from Espeo attended GeeCON conference that was arranged in Poznan. Below I’ll try to summarize talks that I attended and also give a short opinion about conference

Thorbiörn Fritzon
The Future of Java

It was a keynote presented by Oracle employee , who was telling us what is going to happen to Java under it’s new owner. I really have mixed feelings about this speech, it was as Thorbiorn was trying to convince all developers that Oracle is not so bad and will take a good care of our beloved language. Having in mind that Oracle was a main sponsor of a conference it did not sound so convincing for me. I’m sure that Oracle knows how to make money from their products (contrary to Sun) but the future of java still seems blurry. Let’s see..

Stephan Herrmann
Object Teams: The Next Dimension of Modularity

During this session a new approach towards modularity was presented, that somehow extends object oriented paradigm. For me it was much too theoretical and lacking real world example to convince me that there’s a really good reason for using it. Maybe also I’m too far from theoretical discussions about programming to get deeper into it. Anyway, not the best choice for a starting session.

Staffan Nöteberg
Pomodoro Technique: Can you focus for 25 minutes?

This was one of two non-technical speech I attended, actually the reason was my recent interest in personal time management techniques, and not disappointed that i did. First of all Staffan knows how to get attention from listeners so the first thing he did was mentioning a swedish football player – “Staffan the football player” who was shooting a penalty against Poland in 1974. Actually he even shown us a movie with this penalty (saved by Tomaszewski) – this of course put us into a good mood Later actual content so Pomodoro technique was presented. Basically it’s about doing short 25min long time frames when you concentrate only on one task. The idea goes from the fact (as it is for many time management techniques) that task switching is very time consuming.I do like this technique and think it may be valuable for some cases but actually not when doing a teamwork. Some guys from Espeo started even using it, maybe I’ll also give it a try.

Waldemar Kot
Meet Complex Event Processing – emerging paradigm to build sophisticated, event-driven applications

This was also a good topic, especially that I haven’t heard about CEP systems before. It’s a system where inputs are some events, they are processed and some output is generated. One good example of such system may be intrusion detection or pattern detection. CEP consists of a server which handles events and it provides a language – CQL ,that is based on SQL, just operates on events instead of columns. So having in mind specific use cases and thing that such processing may be performing really well (handling over 1M events per second) it may be nice thing to take a closer look. Too bad that again we could see who the sponsor of conference is and Waldek presented only one actual implementation of CEP (of course Oracle’s)

Piotr Walczyszyn
One web. Any device. – Building mobile applications with Flash Platform tools.

Piotr an Adobe evangelist presented new runtime environment for Flash/Flex applications that allows to run same applications both on desktop and mobile devices – also using some special capabilities of devices. I think that in the future it could be very useful, especially that we have and do some projects using flex. Too bad that Piotr didn’t tell us when this runtime will be released (corporate secret). Otherwise the presentation wasn’t so good because of some technical problems.

Chris Aniszczyk
An Introduction to EclipseRT, Equinox and OSGi

Chris works for eclipse foundation and he shown us a set of tools that were created under Eclipse RT (runtime?) brand. He didn’t get into details about those but for me interesting ones to check are
- OSGi support using Equinox
- ECF – Eclipse Communication Framework
- RAP – for creating RIA’s – I really wonder in what extend it uses same codebase as Eclipse RCP applications

If somebody wants to check all the tools there is a sample application – TOAST that presents them and how they could interact with each other

Geertjan Wielenga
(not sure about the title)

There was supposed to be NoSQL presentation using Google App Engine but unfortunately it was cancelled. Insteat Geertjan was talking about Netbeans RCP. I didn’t learn anything useful actually, heard about this platform before and for sure it’s a good choice if you want to build Netbeans like application and you want to use Swing (if you want to SWT just use Eclipse RCP instead).

That was the end of first day. And on the second day we had.. :

Jonas Bonér
Let it crash: using Actors for fault-tolerance, scalability and concurrency

That was a nice start of a day. Actors is a concept I wanted to get deeper for some time. Jonas briefly presented an idea and told us about Akka – a library that we wrote. It looks really interesting and need to check it some time – adding it to personal backlog.

Dalibor Topic
JDK 7 Update

The title says it all – Dalibor presented changes that come with JDK 7. Did learn some new things, but for me presentation was a bit sleepy and few people actually had a nap Project Coin is one interesting thing for me to check.

Joonas Lehtinen
Vaadin – Rich Web Applications in Server-side Java without Plug-ins or JavaScript

That was a nice presentation, even better than I expected. I was interested in it also because for one project we planned to use Vaadin but because of some problems we switched to other solution. Joonas is founder and CEO of IT Mill – company that made Vaadin, told us about history, motivation of library and presented really nice examples, including coding live a sample application. After a presentation I had a chance to talk to Joonas about our experience with Vaadin and how to use it correctly. One conclusion is that it fit’s much better for internal apps and for some specific use cases (remember that there is no client side processing, all happens on the server). I still think that Vaadin is a really nice framework and would definitely like to try it in the future.

Andrea Provaglio
Beyond Agile

This was the second non-technical talk and was really very good. Andrea presented his view on agility, stating some very interesting facts about how to work effectively in agile manner, how to organize teams. Few conclusions from his presentation i note are:
- you always need to try to understand people better
- “give and take” rule – if you give something to somebody there always should be something back from this person. I easiest case it’s paying for a job. Otherwise environment won’t be healthy
- if there is no leader a system will always find it’s natural leader – that’s so true
- heatlhy teams need both self-organization and guidance
- give roots to your team – especially for young organizations – for instance making photos
Also had a talk with Andrea about some problems with agility in our organization and got some interesting ideas. Great guy.

Roman Kalukiewicz
Apache Camel as a DSL for system integration.

Not so nice to say but didn’t concentrate well enough during this conversation. For sure Apache Camel is a nice thing worth checking in the future but no better opinions for now.

Peter Lubbers
HTML5 Web Sockets: All-You-Can-Eat Real Time!

A lot of interesting information for me during this one. I heard something about web sockets before but didn’t have time to take a closer look. Definitely something to pay attention to especially if developing web applications that send and receive some real time data. Too bad that currently only chrome supports it. Firefox will in version 4 and IE in… 11. Worth checking is a site of Peter’s company – kaazing which provides some examples and tools for web sockets.

Andres Almiray
Flying with Griffon

That was the last talk of Geecon. i knew some stuff about Griffon especially that last year for one of our client we developed an application using it, but was wondering how the progress is going and wanted to talk about it with Andres. In general Griffon is a very nice solution, same idea as Grails, but for desktop apps and speeding up development process a lot. Currently Griffon is in version 0.3 (quite low… but 1.0 is always for marketing) but the fact which is a bit worrying is that there is still no commercial support behind it (like there is in Grails case) and Andres still does everything on his own (actually he wrote 60 out of 80 plugins by himself!). I really hope the project will move fast forward because its worth it.

Conlusions
So that was all, in the end we have a nice accent because there was a poll and organizers were giving some gifts for attendees – actually two guys from Espeo, Michał and Robert got books. Congrats guys. Summarizing it was a really nice event, organizers did a really good job, some speeches were very interesting some less but in general most of the subject were on beginner’s level, not going deeply into it. I can say that it was more informative than educated me somehow. I did not attend GeeCON last year but looking at presenters that were in Krakow the level was a bit higher back than. Anyway this was only second edition, I’m sure every year conference will get better and hope it will stay in Poznań. For me one conclusion is to attend conference party (I did not this time) because that’s the best chance to talk with presenters and get some valuable information.

Many European IT companies, especially the ones from Western Europe, decide to outsource their software development tasks, in order to increase their profit through reducing development costs. The reason for this is that these costs are the major and highest ones in the whole software development process. In such case IT providers outside Europe are being chosen mostly, where prices are significantly lower than average European level. But then serious drawbacks of this solution begin to reveal.

First of all communication issues occur. Foreign countries, far away from Europe, may be in different time zone – so time difference is serious and time span to communicate bilateral is much shorter. Furthermore there could be different cultural habits, so even such trivial thing like different national holidays and ceremonies, free of work, may harm communication between parties. Not to mention other cultural and legal distinctions – like different labour policies, pauses in work, number of working hours allowed in a week etc. On the other hand there is also distance, what we must take under our consideration – sometimes there is need to work on site, not always remote working is possible or required. Thus we must take into account significantly higher transportation fees, as usually the ordering party, not the provider, pays it.

Last but not least is the most important drawback – serious quality lacks. All difficulties mentioned above lead up to substantial problem with maintaining constant quality control and jeopardise the overall outcome. For most demanding clients and complex projects it is unacceptable.

But there is a solution. Just outsource your software development from Europe to… Europe! Doesn’t make sense? Actually it does – you can find in Europe a country, where no communication, cultural, territorial or quality issues occur. source: Wikimedia CommonsIt is Poland – central European country, with IT professionals meeting highest European quality standards, but still with labour costs considerably lower than in Western Europe. Thanks to being a member of the European Union, Poland is a convenient partner in software business, because there are no legal obstacles to cooperate with Polish IT companies both remotely and on site.

What about the quality? Polish programmers have always shined with their outstanding programming capabilities – which is why some of the world’s best known technology companies, including Google (with currently 2 research centres in Poland), Motorola and IBM (in collaboration with Wroclaw Research Centre), have decided to set up research centres just in Poland. Polish IT professionals have very strong academic background what guarantees the highest level of IT developers’ education. Adducing the last TopCoder’s country rankings (TopCoder is the world’s largest competitive software development community with 226,851 developers representing over 200 countries) 4 polish universities have placed the top 25 school worldwide: University of Warsaw (1st place in 2005!), University of Wroclaw, Jagiellonian University and Poznan University of Technology.

Staying with TopCoder competitions – these programmer rankings are based on individual and university achievements and Poles regularly lead both sections. In 2005 Poland has left the US behind and taken first place in TopCoder’s country ranking. Currently (2009) Poland take third place.

Listed below are some more of the successes achieved by Polish programmers – in the Imagine Cup, the world’s premier student technology competition, hosted by Microsoft Corporation:

• Imagine Cup 2009 (Cairo, Egypt):
  MashUp – second place
  Interoperability Award – second place
  H.E. Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak Special Award – winner

• Imagine Cup 2008 (Paris, France):
  Embedded Development – third place

• Imagine Cup 2007 (Seoul, South Korea):
  Algorithm – first place

• Imagine Cup 2006 (Delhi, India):
  Algorithm – first, second and third place (!)

As highlighted above – Poland turns out to be a perfect destination for outsourcing software development, with no obstacles typical for outsourcing countries outside Europe, with outstanding IT capabilities and highest quality standards but still in attractive prices. Sounds like a bargain – and in fact it is! So when you are going to develop a software and you need to enlarge your development team for this or you simply don’t have staff available to make it – don’t hire anyone but use outsourcing to Poland. It is fast and convenient way for delivering high quality, complex software on place, on time, on budget.

There are views, nice views. Views of growth, prosperity, success. Still a lot to do – but what’s been done, is going now in the right direction. Not only the number of projects is rising – but the number of our own developers as well. It’s just like in a nature – the better soil, the better plants – but also bigger crops so more hands are needed.

After quite successful beginning of this year we had another office party – it helps us not to forget where we work Simply a statement from our marketing materials which says “Members of Espeo are its greatest value” it’s totally true! And what was this time? A mysterious place in deep woods with classical tenpin bowling facilities – it was truly something! None of us was experienced in it – so it was seriously challenging for every member of our crew. How astonishing emotions were there, you couldn’t simply imagine.
Leading was changing every single minute, every point counted, every move was… a crap   There were some moves worth seeing, but basically – we were poor. Especially… me,  to be honest. At first it wasn’t going so badly – but as the time passed by, so did our “talent”. Nonetheless there were winners – however I wasn’t among them.

We really enjoyed it. And we enjoy what’s going on around us. A temperature is rising, a sun is less and less timidly showing behind the clouds and our company is growing thanks to proper watering. After the raining times there is a rainbow on the sky. Now let’s find the rainbow treasure!

Winter is in its peak nowadays! It’s so cold, that minus five degrees (Celsius) feels
like hot, minus fifteen is typical and when it’s minus twenty five – we can say “it’s
getting a bit colder” A temperature exceeding minus thirty degrees is even happening
- what a weather, for God’s sake we’re not in a deep Russia, are we?!

Although our cars are seriously wounded by this critical conditions and getting to the
office on time is becoming a challenge – development process stays unimpressed and
evolves as was meant to. Simply astonishing way of dealing with complex IT projects -
despite the world is so unfriendly outside, in house it all works like a Swiss watch.
Public transport is struggling with major drawbacks, roads are black no more and are
becoming a one, huge ice rink, selected schools are going to be closed, flight are being
canceled one after another – but developers from Espeo are doing their job as usual.

What can I say – guys still make a huge impression on me, even when I’m no longer the
“new one”. As a sales person all I can do is to stay aside, admire their achievement and
make sure there will be always some challenging projects in a queue.

And it’s happened – the 2009 is over… The time is passing by like a TGV train – is it just me or it happens to everybody?

I look at my mates in the office and I see they know that it is 2010 now. However they don’t seem to bother – it looks like they have a new energy to work, to have a fresh start in a new year.  Good for them! Having a spare time is something, we can’t afford nowadays – and it could be even harder, as some new challenges are right ahead. And you know what? I can read from our developers’ faces that they were expecting it! Even more – they were waiting for it, as new challenges are like an air to breath for them, like a petrol for a racecar – “too much” is not in their vocabulary.

What can I say – let the 2010 begin!

As far as a team’s effectiveness is concerned, I can easily tell, that in my opinion, based on my eye-witnessed observations, employees who are familiar with and experienced in agile methodology are far better team players than those who aren’t. This statement’s got even stronger meaning, when you realize, that for me it is a totally new subject and I’ve never come across this kind of methodology in software development before!

It all started during our office Christmas party. We were divided into two groups, with different goals to achieve. What surprised me the most, was that making two groups was the difficult part – as everyone wanted to be with everyone   After two teams were made – all following steps were processed as they were planned to, without a scratch, and all were delivered on time. The level of understanding and an easiness of acting as a team was astonishing.

The next day I was even more mystified when I discovered, that during typical business activities concerning software development, all was lead in the same way as it was still a Christmas party – with a great understanding, effective cooperation, perfect communication and in awesome moods.  In this moment it became obvious to me – it is the way how software should be developed. Ever.