I never sleep well on the road. Going to the other side of the planet doesn’t help, but sometimes there are more important things to do than sleep.

The Great India Developer Summit provides plenty of them. It’s a four-day show, held this year at the National Science Seminar Complex in Bangalore, India. At the generous invitation of Saltmarch Media, I spoke on all four days of the conference, in the .NET, Web, Java, and Workshop tracks. I gave talks on Decision Making, Complexity Theory, Gaelyk, Open Source Business Intelligence, and Liquibase. I also gave three-hour workshops on Gaelyk and Liquibase.

This was my first time at an Indian conference and my first time in India. Sadly, a tight schedule and responsibilities from the office back home kept me from being able to enjoy Bangalore outside of the hotel and conference venue. However, just the conference experience was different enough from my normal to make it interesting all by itself.

The expo hall and speakers’ lounge were open-air, which made for a few warm afternoons, but made the tropical rain on Thursday and Friday that much more beautiful. Most remarkable to an American speaker are the huge posters placed outside of each lecture hall bearing the speakers’ names and session titles. This functions as a handy guide to the day’s activity in any given room—and an embarrassing one to boot. American conference speakers love being the center of attention (why else would we be conference speakers?), but we’re shocked and surprised when people actually treat us that way. There is an irony here.

Attendees at any conference tend to assign more honor and privilege to speakers than any of us deserves, but the delegates at GIDS took this to a new level. They really seemed like they were deeply honored to have us there, and were not at all shy about approaching speakers after a session to ask questions on any subject. They acted as if we were the sort of people whose faces you’d put on giant posters! This is probably just a difference of degree from the attention speakers get in US and European conferences, but it’s a remarkable difference nonetheless.

GIDS treats its speakers very well, having put us up in the beautiful ITC Windsor. I am a well-known sucker for a breakfast buffet, but a breakfast buffet with vada and coriander chutney makes that much more a fool of me. (There were some Western comfort breakfast foods in there too, like French toast and sausage. These were not ignored.) The staff was polite and helpful in the extreme, the wireless Internet functional, and the room beautiful. It was a fine home away from home for the week.

I’m glad to be home and back to a conference-free life for a couple of months (No Fluff notwithstanding, of course), but the experience was invaluable, and I hope I can repeat it in future years.

As an important aside, the name Saltmarch, which meant nothing to me before my trip, turns out to be something like the Indian Boston Tea Party. Thanks to my friend Venkat Subramaniam for that explanation.

A week ago I had the privilege of speaking at the 2011 Scandinavian Developer Conference. This was my second year at the show. The Friday before the conference, Matthew McCullough and I put on a one-day public Git training workshop in Gothenburg, which was very well received. It’s always fun sharing the stage with Matthew.

My wife also came along with me this time. Gothenburg isn’t known as a tourist town, but it’s still got a lot to offer a couple of Americans who tend to enjoy just about any European city. We enjoyed walking around town and getting outside town a little bit. She took a few hundred beautiful pictures as usual.

I gave three talks: NoSQL Smackdown, Database Refactoring with Liquibase, and HTML5: The JavaScript Parts. NoSQL Smackdown was standing room only, with probably 150 people in the room, which is always gratifying. It’s a hot topic, and the talk explains the landscape fairly well.

The bad part about attending conferences is that I can’t really attend them. There are paying work and writing projects that demand attention, so I can’t go to all the sessions I want. I did attend one, though, given by Anna Herting. Her talk, essentially an extended urge to remain calm about the awesomeness of Agile and focus instead on pragmatic ways to be successful, was excellent. She made two points about the perils of small teams that resonated with me in particular, mostly because I knew I’ve been guilty of both in the past.

First, Anna explained that a small team can freeload on the efficiencies of being small and get away with low-grade engineering practices while still delivering good results. For instance, the team might never refactor and never write tests, but they all know the code so well that they remain fairly happy and deliver value to customers anyway. This sounds a lot like Joel Spolsky’s Duct Tape Programming, which I was never convinced was a good idea. To be fair, meeting human needs (or “creating business value” as we often prefer to say) is the proximate goal of our vocation, and code craft is a close second, but this kind of entrenched sloppiness remains an accrued liability that will move disastrously from the balance sheet to the cash flow statement some sad day when the team grows or undergoes turnover. I’ve been there before, so Anna’s words stung a bit. In a good way.

Second, she talked about how a small team with lots of direct customer contact is in danger of becoming more aligned with the customer than the business. If customers constantly present critical issues directly to a small team of developers—with the customer-developer contact presented as high-touch service, or some such soothing excuse—then those developers may begin to make decisions that benefit the customer first and the business second. Again, this might not seem so bad, and to be fair, one might come to the conclusion that the customer’s benefit is always the business’s benefit. However, I’m pretty sure one would be wrong in that case.

There were great insights, and deserve to be spread wider. There was more to the talk than that, of course, but this is what hit me the most. I hope Anna keeps looking for opportunities to speak, even if she isn’t going to become an insane globe-trotting conference monger like Some People I Know.

In summary, the show was great, the food was great, the city was great, the people were great. It’s always a treat to catch up with old friends (although I definitely didn’t get to spend enough time with certain people) and make new ones. I certainly hope to be back in Gothenburg next year.

I’ve put together a screen cast showing how to configure Tomcat and VisualVM for a secure JMX connection using self-signed certificates and a password. You can download it as a Quicktime video here:

Managing Tomcat with JMX (43.4MB, 1024×768)

This is a slightly cleaned-up version of some video in a talk I gave at SpringOne 2GX last week entitled Grails in the Real World. The talk was a summary of my experiences as a Grails developer and trainer, including a few tools and techniques I think are helpful when using Grails successfully in the wild. I talked a lot about Liquibase, some common GORM pitfalls, how to approach training and advocacy of Grails, and of course, how to use JMX.

Even though JMX is a very mature technology, getting this kind of thing to work is a perennial pain for users of any application container and web framework. I hope this quick video helps you out. Let me know how I could have improved it!

I was privileged to present at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway this week. JavaZone is Norway’s major Java-centered conference, and drew around 2,500 people this year. It’s a high-energy show with well-known and impressive marketing. There were seven tracks of presentations from regional and international speakers and a busy exhibition floor, mostly populated (in my extremely unscientific sample) with Norwegian consulting and technology companies.

I gave one lightning talk in the first session of the day on Wednesday. It was a ten-minute variant of my now well-rehearsed Then Our Buildings Shape Us: Form And Content in Software Development. JavaZone lightning talks are ten minutes in length, so I had to expand on the Ignite-style format the talk currently has. Turns out I expanded too much, and I didn’t quite finish in time, despite the fact that my rehearsals indicated that I’d finish 10-15 seconds early. I think being in front of a live audience encourages a speaker to elaborate on the script just a bit, which this very constrained form doesn’t really allow. Lesson learned.

Around lunchtime on Thursday, I gave Decision Making in Software Teams. The talk was well-received, eliciting good feedback on Twitter and—better yet—in person. JavaZone, showing their class as a conference, rewarded me with a bottle of red wine, which will be shared with Mrs. Berglund later in the week.

Oslo offers no shortage of incredible opportunities for tourists, and fortunately I was able to take two days before the show and enjoy some of those sites. On Monday we visited the Viking Museum, which is a collection of first millennium Viking artifcats centered around a few more or less complete longboats.

Later that day, we walked around the National Palace, a beautiful building surrounded by some first-class gardens.

Our hotel, which wasn’t situated in a particularly historic part of town, still offered beautiful views from the window.

No tourist visit to Oslo could possibly be complete without a visit to the Sculpture Park, a sprawling garden on the west end of the city build around a number of stone sculptures depicting various kinds of human relationships in various phases of development. I won’t elaborate on it here, except to say that if you take your time and pay attention to the art, it’s a deeply moving experience.

There was more to the show and to the trip, but the best travelogue is the shortest. Schedule permitting, I’ll certainly be sending proposals to JavaZone in 2011. If you’re a speaker, I encourage you to do the same.

I had the immense pleasure of traveling to New York City last week to speak at the NYC Java SIG to promote the upcoming No Fluff Just Stuff show in Jersey City. The Java SIG is what most people call a JUG, but in world class cities, they have a bit more flexibility in setting their own conventions. You’re going to call it a SIG, and you know what? You’re still going to love it.

I’ve driven through and around Manhattan before, but I’ve never really been in the city. I had a scant 20 hours to enjoy the place, which I did with some abandon. I’m fundamentally a man of the suburbs, but I love the city, and lovers of the city are truly bound to enjoy Midtown. I will certainly be back at my earliest opportunity.

The JUG—or rather, the SIG—is led by the redoubtable Frank Greco, CEO of Crossroads Technologies (no relation). I gave my talk on Gaelyk, shown here:

There was lively discussion about Gaelyk’s very lightweight structure as a framework, and the limitations imposed by that structure. Many of the SIG attendees are Enterprise developers in the classical sense, so a product like this was understandably strange to them. And to be sure, I would never commend it for use in anything of even moderate complexity. However, for sites so simple you don’t want to incur the cognitive cost of dealing with a larger framework, and for which any kind of sophisticated hosting would be overkill, Gaelyk is a perfect fit. Interaction with the audience moved delightfully to a discussion of the way our tools shape the way we solve problems, and even the kinds of problems we consider tractable. Winston Churchill was quoted. Neal Postman was referenced. was commended. Win, win, and win.

All in all, an enjoyable trip and a solid talk with a first-class JUG. Thanks to Jay Zimmerman and the NYC Java SIG for the experience.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Scandinavian Developers Conference in Goteborg, Sweden. I flew out on Sunday afternoon with my friends Matthew McCullough and Paul Rayner, who were also speakers at the conference. We arrived in Göteborg on Monday afternoon and checked into the Hotel Gothia Towers, finding comfortable rooms with all of the free, fast broadband a geek could want. This is the stuff of Norse epics.

The conference’s organizers treated the speakers to an exclusive dinner on Monday night at a nearby restaurant whose name was sadly lost to jet lag. Conversation flowed freely for hours among world-class talents whose company I was honored to keep.

The show opened on Tuesday with a keynote by Michael Feathers. Michael observed that the software community has thought less about design and more about process in the past decade. He suggested that web-scale computing heralds a return to constraint-based engineering, which will cause some strain in previous approaches to design and will likely overthrow the recent emphasis on process, restoring engineering to a prominent place in the work of the software developer.

On Tuesday, Matthew and I led a fishbowl discussion on “the dire need for encryption in web apps.” Technology topics often provoke emotional disagreements and highly affective conflict, but encryption is rare in that it also to touches concepts and passions that are as much social and political as technical. We spoke very little of key lengths and rainbow tables and much more of the economics of encryption, the nature of private property, and the relationship between the State and the individual. Our community needs more panels like this one.

The show’s seven tracks covered many topics, but overall evinced a heavy emphasis on Agile and Lean methods. Diana Larsen’s keynote on Wednesday morning riffed on the role of the manager is the agile organization, describing leaders more as curators of human flourishing than directors of mechanical activity. The more I interact with agile thinkers, the more I’m persuaded that this is a philosophical program I can get behind.

I spoke Wednesday afternoon in the Emerging Technologies and Cloud Computing track on how to use Grails and JMX together. My talk gave a lightning overview of Grails for the uninitiated (which turned out to be nearly everyone in attendance), a quick refresher on JMX, a video tutorial on how to manage Tomcat from VisualVM securely and over a public connection, a description of the Grails plugin architecture, and a quick tour of the kinds of the things the Grails JMX Plugin will let you do. It ended with a live demo of controller action statistics exposed by the plugin as MBeans. We even ended five minutes early!

I ended the conference with Kent Beck’s talk on Wednesday afternoon about the organizational changes necessary to release often. He discussed the kinds of organizational structures implied by a discipline annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, and continuous releases—fascinating process thinking from a true thought leader. I had the unexpected pleasure of sitting with Ken, his partner Cindee, and two of their daughters at Dinner 22 after the show. Our discussion of value-based consulting and integrating family life into a heavy travel schedule was more helpful to me than two hours of TDD mentoring would have been—and it’s not like I couldn’t use expert help with the latter.

Which is to say nothing of the reindeer steak, which may end up being the best food I eat this year. Time will tell.

Matthew, Paul, and I spent Thursday exploring Göteborg. Despite the cloudy and cold day, we found that the city had much charm to offer. It is safe, clean, and offered plentiful cafes filled with earnest, multilingual conversation, coffee, and all the baked goods you could metabolize. (Wifi was less than plentiful, but we managed to survive.)

The conference itself was superbly organized and run—and I don’t say that only because they had the foresight to accept a talk on Grails. The organizers took good care of their speakers, selected world-class headliners, incorporated sponsors in an appropriate way, and encouraged some nontraditional forms like the fishbowl talks and the open-space-style “conversation corners.” A huge thanks to Lennart Olsen of Iptor Konsult AB for his outstanding work, and especially for his coaching of my Swedish—which, as he pointed out, is not nearly as good as my surname might suggest!

It was truly a world-class conference which I’d be happy to attend again next year. Thanks to all who made it possible.