Blogging Pubbitch

"Once you're in the venue, it's all on one level. If you need help lifting in your budgie, there will be staff to help."

Excuse me? Help lifting my budgie?

I've promised not to say where I heard this. But I heard it. Honest.

There's something nice about finally returning home after a long time away. I'm not quite sure when I started looking forward to spending a night in my own bed, but after a week in Atlanta, the better part of a month in Sydney and a long weekend in Norfolk with only the most fleeting of temporary visits back, I can assure you that I'm looking forward to curling up somewhere familiar and comfortable. And just to make it clear, by "somewhere familiar and comfortable" I mean home.

Don't get me wrong, I've loved the traveling --- it's a wonderful opportunity to catch up with friends in foreign lands, and a chance to make new friends and acquaintances as I do challenging and rewarding work, but it's nice to be back.

Now, I wonder if the milk in the fridge is suitable for a nice, hot cup of tea....

How cool is this?

Who'd have thought it? Bananas kill warts.

Sometimes, I wonder if I should just devote this blog to something other than "mainly tech" :)

Here I am in Austria. On my first night, I managed to eat at an Italian restaurant before ending up in an Irish bar. I suspect that I've not quite got the hang of this travel thing. Oh well, at least I overslept this morning!

I've had a couple of reports that my atom feed was broken. It was because of XML parsers doing what the spec says and choking on poorly formed XML (unbalanced tags in this case, where XML states that "a" and "A" are different)

I've now run the thing through the quite wonderful feed validator, so here's hoping that everything continues to work!

I'm a thousand miles from home and feeling lucky to be here. In the grand scheme of things, there aren't many people who promised themselves they'd always do a job they loved and managed to stick to it. Tonight, I met challenging, smart and articulate people at XtC and also had a chance to hang out, again, with friends I made in Australia. Tomorrow, or more accurately today, I go to work on some fascinating challenges tinged with the possibility of innovative visualization of the information. If it works, it'll be awesome. I'm actually looking forward to waking up early, and mornings? Normally you can forget about them. Politely. Without profanity. This time? Oh yeah! I'll be there.

So, the work-life is going swimmingly, what about the real-life? You work to live, and all that guff. That's shiny too. I'm not sure it's something I'd like to talk about on my blog, open as it is to the world, but life is amazing right now.

Life? It's bloody brilliant.

On Monday, 25th February, I'll be at the Selenium Users Open Evening. I'll be doing a Lightning Talk on the relationship between WebDriver and Selenium, which will be a (very) swift overview of what WebDriver is before delving into the meat of the matter. There probably won't be a duel this time!

There will Selenium developers from as far apart as Tokyo, London and the US attending, so it's a great opportunity to meet up with these guys. Better yet, the event is open to the public, so it's the perfect chance to meet Selenium users and talk about next generation web testing. It's being run at the main Google campus in Mountain View from about 6pm. I'm sure that someone, somewhere will post more comprehensive details and I'll link to these when they're posted, but I hope to see you there!

Update: Details are up here on the OpenQA site now.

It's only natural that over time, as teams grow and codebases change, projects acquire an oral history. Newcomers may look at the code askance and wonder why a particular way of structuring the code was taken, or why this module is written this way, but this one (over here) is written that way. The problem is that this oral history is normally spread between lots of different people, and these people have a habit of not always being available when you're puzzling over something that looks like a cack-handed design decision. Surely, you ponder, because everyone on the team is working to the best of their abilities, this must have been done this way deliberately. Things get even more tricky when people leave a project, taking their store of oral history (sorry, implicit knowledge) with them.

Now, the most common way that I've seen this addressed is to assiduously update the project wiki, which works just fine until the second week of effort when the pressures of delivery finally eat away at the "spare" time it takes to keep everything up to date. Another way to cope is to limit the rate at which people join and leave the team, attempting to spread the implicit knowledge to as many people as possible. This leads to humorous discussions as people remember different aspects of a particular decision or phase of the project, but doesn't resolve the root issue that there's no readily accessible source of truth to talk to about why Things Are the Way They Are.

Enter the Project Shaman. She's responsible for being the Fountain of Stories about the history of the project. She remembers all the important turning points, the amusing stories, and the reasons behind all those strange choices now enshrined in the plastic mess of the codebase. I always imagine that she can impart the stories with a certain light-hearted humour, but I suppose you could have some grim-faced, dour soul. The important thing is that a team now has a Source of Truth, who remembers the ways of the ancients and can shed light on even that darkest of mysteries: a large codebase.

But what to do when your trusted, knowledgable Shaman decides to leave? Haven't we just introduced a single point of failure? If she goes, then your entire team has lost its oral history. Well, in all but the most tragic of circumstances, there's normally some kind of warning that the Shaman's about to leave, giving her plenty of time to pass on the story of the project to another person. This is made easier if the Shaman has been sharing stories on a regular basis, and it helps that there tend to be only a few areas in a codebase that make people frown and wonder aloud how it came to be that way. Admittedly, some of those areas might be pretty big, but that's another point entirely! Finally, just because there's a Shaman, there's no reason why the ad hoc gathering of stories and history that always goes on in a project can't still occur. I know that last point is a direct contradiction of what I said earlier, but the Shaman brings efficiency to the process of recall, she doesn't replace it.

I've been meaning to blog for a while, but have so many things that I want to blog about that it's been hard to decide what to write about first. Worse (or better, depending on how you look at it) I've now been given a complete weekend to spend as I want to; I've a nasty case of predator confusion kicking in.

So, what's on the list of things to do?

• Work on WebDriver
  • Work on the IE driver:
    • Finish the text handling work I started on Friday. It looks like it won't be perfect, but it should be pretty close to what I want it to do.
    • Figure out why adding an event sink to the driver slows it down so dramatically. To see it, take a look at uncommenting the lines to do with the event sink in the InternetExplorerDriver.cpp.
    • Dig into MSXML to see if it's possible to adapt the IE DOM and get XPath evaluation "for free". This would make it easier to port WebDriver to different languages, such as Ruby or Python.
  • Look at integrating appscript into the safari driver, which means:
    • Learning Objective C
    • Getting to grips with XCode
    • Finding out if it's possible to statically link a Framework into a dynamic library. This would avoid making a user install appscript. Of course, there could be another way to get round this, so perhaps it's just a case of sitting down and using Google effectively :)
    All of those would be fun.
• Play on the PlayStation --- I hardly ever use it, and that's just dumb.
• Write some blog entries. I've got one to write on Continuous Integration and Build Pipelines on huge codebases, and I should also write about progress on WebDriver.
• Walk around the neighbourhood. It's not dark yet, and I really want to feel more at home here. There's a nice park nearby, which has lovely views over the city.
• Do some work around the house. There's still a pile of things to do around here. I should do some of them!
• Do some cooking. I like it and I've got a huge box of veg to work through. There must be something nice that I could do....

I'm sure that there's still more things that I could add to that list, but the point is that so far I've been unsuccessfully trying to do a little of each. Time to focus, I think.