Tom Hume

It's a little personal anniversary for me today - exactly 10 years since I started practicing Aikido.

At my age that still feels like a long time, and it's passed frighteningly fast. What's also strange is how different my life is now to then. I can't think of many things in my life that have lasted more than 10 years: no employment, no educational establishment, no relationship. The only things that spring to mind are family, a clutch of treasured friendships, and general geekiness.

10 years isn't a long time in Aikido terms - my instructors have more than 30 each under their belts, and still emphasise how much they have to learn. I hope I've been quite careful not to bang on about it here (or elsewhere), but I've been promising myself that once I got to this point I'd give myself license to talk about analogies I see between this stuff and the other things I do. I think there are commonalities between all sorts of craft and I'm sure that if I were a musician I'd see them there; it just so happens that the two things I've done most deeply are software development and aikido. Be warned: I might start writing about them here.

(Mmm, software development and martial arts. Why don't I get invited to more parties?)

And on a side-note, this also marks a personal best in procrastination. One of those little jobs I've been meaning to "get around to any day now" - for TEN BLOODY YEARS - is setting up a direct debit to pay for my classes. I have to do it now... or hmm, maybe leave it another 10...

A huge thankyou to Tom and Maria Helsby, and everyone at Airenjuku Brighton who's put up with me over the last decade. Now, mouth shut, hands open...

• Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development by Martin Fowler;
• Industry trends in prototyping by Dave Cronin;
• Kaizen and Kaikaku, an analysis of where agile adoptions go wrong. Happy to report we went Kaikaku;
• Flaccid Scrum, for the title alone;
• Fascinating set of user interface principles for Palm WebOS;
• More wisdom from Jeff Patton on product owners and product design;
• Web Programming Is Hard, via ATobe;
• Dougie passed on Programming Sucks;
• Continuous Deployment: now there's a good target;
• One Free Interaction, a wonderful essay from the Cooper Journal;
• Recreating the Button, a painstaking investigation of the redesign of web buttons for Google;
• Scrum is not about engineering practices;
• Continuing the life tracking theme, BedPosted - a site for you to track your sexual encounters with;

We've just had some rather good news - and a fringe benefit of this is that I can share my favourite photos[1] of 2008 with you:

Mr Falletti and I took a top-secret 1-day trip to Seattle last December to present Future Platforms to Microsoft and put us forward for a very interesting piece of work. These things usually take time to bear fruit, but I can now reveal that we've won the job. It would be a chronic understatement to say we're all tremendously excited that the world's largest software company chose us over the competition.

My lips are tightly (and rightly) sealed when it comes to talking about what we're doing, and in fact you won't be hearing a great deal from me in the immediate future; we're collocating our team with MS for the start of the project, so we'll all be out of the country for a little while. I'll be able to talk a lot more about what we're up to in due course, though.

The one downside of this is that I get to miss Mobile World Congress (again), and LIFT (which I was really looking forward to). But hey - we're a service agency, and with the UK heading into recession it seems churlish in the extreme to complain about winning a large piece of interesting work from a high-profile new customer :)

Oh alright then, it's my *second* favourite photo, after this one:

Two of the most wonderful people walking the earth were married yesterday. Steve is one of my oldest friends, one of the crowd I fell in with during teenage years (mis)spent exploring the dingier indie/alternative nightclubs of Brighton. We've subsequently worked together (he joined Good Technology at it's first operations guy), lived together, and we train together at Airenjuku Brighton - where he and Yvonne met.
I was proud to stand at his side on the day and assist as his best man.

The wedding was appropriate and gorgeous, with the ceremony held in the Red Room of Brighton Pavilion, on Valentine's day. A tour of the pavilion followed, then a fantastic meal provided by Due South, and a knees-up at Circus Circus with a crowd of familiar faces, and some old friends I've not has a chance to catch up with in years.

At the end of the night, as the last few revellers prepared to stagger away, Yvonne did a reading - a riff on The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer. I liked it so much I stole her notes, so I could write it up here:

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your hearts longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what grade you are at aikido. I want to know if you feel a sense of pleasant exhilaration even though you're pouring with sweat and it's nearly the end of class.

I was to know if you can get up after a night of watching The Wire and still practice chi gong in the lounge before you go to work.

It doesn't interest me that you use Microsoft Windows. I want to know that you can use Linux, Debian and open source DSB (and other derivatives of UNIX). And that you can fix our home computer when all broadband connections fail. As well as the computer at my sisters, my mum, your grandfather, your dad and all our family and friends.

I want to know that you can eat half of the bar of chocolate that's in the kitchen, and leave the other half for me when I get home from work, even though I scoffed the whole lot last week.

It doesn't interest me if the joke that you are telling is funny. I want to know that you can laugh at your own jokes even when those around you look blank and confused.

I want to know that you can groove on the dance floor and that you truly like the shapes that you throw in the light of the disco ball.

Perfect. Joh (Steve's sister - oh Brighton, you are an incestuous little city) has posted the reading she gave at the service too.

W00t, as they say on the interwebs: I submitted my application for Certified Scrum Practitioner qualification a week or so back, and received news this week that I'd passed.

Whilst the only requirement for passing the first grade in Scrum certification ("Certified Scrum Master") is that you attend a 2-day training course, to get CSP you have to have been running Scrum projects for a year, and to submit a written application referencing a project you've been involved with, giving detail on all aspects of it: teamwork, success criteria, what you learned doing it, and so forth. My application was based around the development of Trutap 2.0 last year - 7-month project, the largest we've run from start to finish with Scrum, and one that pleased both us and our client.

My aim in doing the CSM training (which was majority-funded by TrainToGain - thoroughly recommended btw) was to immediately take CSP. I'm not a big fan of certification for these sorts of skills, but a test based on real-world project work would seem to indicate we have at least some familiarity with methods in both theory and practice. FP sits in an industry where most companies are emphatic about their "agility", often without being too clear on exactly what that means... so I was also keen to have some sort of independent evaluation of how we operate.

Not many people make the transition from CSM to CSP. There are roughly 30,000 CSM-qualified folks worldwide, but only around 500 CSPs; and of these only 30 resident in the UK. Hopefully this will help us stand out from the crowd a little, and reassure potential clients that we know our onions when it comes to this stuff.

Thanks to Ms Hunt for all her help and support along the journey - it's your turn now Joh! :)

It looks very likely that I'll have a ticket for LIFT, and a hotel booking (at the nearby Hotel Admiral) up for sale if anyone's interested... some upcoming business (of which more soon) looks likely to prevent my going this year. I'm gutted because LIFT is my favourite conference, but needs must...

If you're interested, drop me an email or leave a comment...

Once again, I'll be missing Mobile World Congress - and thus an opportunity to catch up with Dom, or to see a certain Google presentation and the attendant security- this year... and therefore missing the lovely Swedish Beers which Helen is organising on Wednesday 18th.

The last one I made it to (in 2006 I think) was up to the usual standards - i.e. an unhealthy percentage of the mobile content and apps world in a single room, loosening their inhibitions most pleasantly :) Gutted to be missing it again...

I seem to have been banned from the WMLProgramming mailing list, ending the 9 or so years that I've spent there. I'm not entirely sure why - my last posts there weren't particularly controversial, pointing out that lots of transcoder products include features to add navigation bars; and suggesting that the developer community engage more with operators to minimise the damage done by irresponsible deployments.

Most likely, the list moderator (Luca Passani) has lost patience with me. Luca, I, and others have been debating lots of the issues around transcoding over the last 6 months. We frequently disagree on the detail of how to approach it, though when it comes to the basics I've long felt that we're in agreement: this is a serious problem and one that needs to be dealt with. My willingness to debate the issue politely with Luca has led to my being categorised a "bad faith arguer" - the implication being that I don't actually believe the points I'm putting forward, but choose to do so to annoy or otherwise aggravate.

Absolute poppycock, of course. I'm saying this stuff - and putting my own time into the W3C MWBP Group - because I actually believe it (and have done for some time). Despite what Luca might wish to present, like many complex issues this isn't black and white, but nuanced: there are many opinions, and many subtleties. Recently I've been disagreeing with Luca on the likelihood that, say, OpenWave develop features in their products that they promise to never deploy. Do this mean I blindly support transcoder vendors in what they're doing? No - at the same time I'm arguing with Charles of Opera that transcoding of HTTPS links is dangerous from a security perspective.

The standards of acceptable behaviour on WMLProgramming seem one-sided. On the one hand it's acceptable to call the W3C participants "fuckers" or "assholes", those who debate with you "collaborationists" and "morons", or transcoder vendors "arrogant bastards that need to be treated as the beasts they are". It's considered an adult approach to "keep telling them how much we hate them until they don't cease and desist". It's OK to call the W3C fuckers "because they deserved it". And arguing in bad faith is only possible, it seems, if you're on the other side of the table from Luca.

At the same time it's unacceptable to politely and repeatedly disagree with Luca on these issues. When I do so, it appears that I become the enemy; it's asserted that I'm only arguing to distract from the issue, my motivations are questioned, it's snidely insinuated that I might be on the payroll of operators or transcoder vendors... all fairly childish and unpleasant stuff, and not a tactic that's confined to me (an ex-Vodafone employee expressing an opinion, for instance, was dismissed as a "troll")

This double-standard is annoying to have to deal with, but I worry that when this childish and abusive view is presented as being representative of the "development community" (if there is such a thing), it does us all harm. I find it embarrassing to be associated with: this is not how I want my position presented publicly, and I know I'm not alone in thinking there must be a more adult way to discuss these issues. I don't accept the line that the seriousness of the issue justifies a "no holds barred" approach: governments debate much more serious problems (nuclear proliferation, say), without resorting to name-calling.

When Luca threatened to ban me a couple of months back, I was touched to see a few messages of support pop up on the list, asking him to reconsider. At the same time I've been told off-list that at least one message of support didn't make it onto the list. It looks like there's some level of censorship going on, without accountability or objectivity. Dissenting views are important for debate, and we're unlikely to persuade the transcoder industry to self-regulate without talking to them about it. To this end a place where all parties can meet and discuss openly in a civilised environment is important: I don't think WMLProgramming is that place.

All of the above is a bit sad really - WMLProgramming is a collection of some very knowledgeable and talented folks, and with write access removed I'll be unable to contribute, or to correct some of the more outlandish assertions that pop up there with worrying frequency. At the same time, I'll have a bit more spare time (which is welcome right now) and a reason to investigate some of the other fine mobile development resources out there like mobiforge or the BetaVine forums. I'd be interested to hear about any others that might be lurking out there...

Mobile phone sales are polarising, apparently: "it is clear that people are either getting devices that have functionality that really adds something to their life - making their life better, more enjoyable or more productive - or they are going for a cheaper type of deal"

One of the things that Trutap surprised me with was the revelation (to me at least) that in "developing" markets like India, smartphones are a popular choice despite their high cost relative to average incomes... the rationalisation being that if you're going to spend a greater chunk of your income on a mobile device, it had better be a decent one, and something you'll keep for a long time.

Recession hits the UK, and it looks like the same cost-conscious behaviour follows in its wake...

Interesting post listing some of the error states specific to mobile; one of the beefs we have had with classic Visio wireframes for representing flow through mobile services is the number of interruptions, error conditions, and recoveries which seem to blight mobile: latency, cost of data, battery life, storage and memory limitations, etc.

On the other hand, dealing with some of these issues is really finicky: take identity as an example. On the web, it's straightforward: username and password to login to a site, cookies to identify repeat visitors. On mobile aspects of identity are frequently split between the device (e.g. cookies in the browser), the SIM card (identifying your mobile number and providing a route to a billing relationship with you) and sometimes elsewhere on the network. Take that handset you used to login to that mobile site, sell it on ebay, and suddenly someone who looks like you to the site, but isn't, has access to your stuff - potentially with yourself footing the bill.

Lots of nasty edge cases here, many of which I remember our looking through in great detail during the early days of projects like Flirtomatic and Trutap. Whether it's worth designing systems to accommodate them all, or better to leave edge cases to customer support, is a different matter - and there'll be a balance to be found here.