Doing it WithStyle

As per my previous post, I was scheduled to arrive in London today. Unfortunately, I am stuck in Australia for an indeterminent period of time due to one sheet of paper being in limbo somewhere in the U.K. rather than on this side of the globe in my hands. This magical piece of paper is the original copy of my work permit and looks something like this. I have been approved to work in the U.K. but not to enter the country! I have a copy of a letter from the Border and Immigration Agency that says that my permit has been approved but sadly the U.K. Government's electronic records and signed letters are not enough to be issued an entry clearance - a requirement for people in my situation since November 2003. Only the original piece of paper sent from the other side of the world will do.

I only learned of this impediment on Christmas Eve when I fronted at the high security British High Commission office in Canberra. This was just after my employer's office closed for Christmas with the staff I have been dealing with away until the 2nd of January. A week is a long time to wait for any action when your partner is on the other side of the world trying to open bank accounts and find a place to live without you.

When I called the Border and Immigration Agency in the U.K. just a couple of hours ago I was told that it is illegal for them to tell me if my work permit has been printed, dispatched or anything else about it! Now, after working flat-out to throw out, store or sell every item I own in a couple of weeks, I am forced to spend another couple of weeks twiddling my thumbs, unable to enter a country that I have entered half-a-dozen times before. This is an extremely frustrating first run-in with the British Bureaucracy.

Following the sad demise of Wizard Information Services, the time has come to move on. After 10 1/2 years at Wizard, I finished up there on Tuesday. It certainly has been a rollercoaster ride. We had 160 staff at one point but were down to a skeleton staff of only 7 others in the R&D area when I left. Ironically we were producing our best technology when we went out of business.

I'm heading back to a grey and cold old London to take up a role as Agile Coach with Conchango who are "the largest independent consultancy delivering Business, Interactive Media and Technical solutions in the UK". I'm really excited about this opportunity. Agile coaching is something that I simply can't pursue sustainably in Australia at this point - certainly not with the opportunity to work with blue chip clients like those with which Conchango is engaged. A number of my soon-to-be-colleagues are blogging here.

My partner and I fly out on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas). Fingers crossed that I can get my household packed up in time and that my work permit comes through next week...

Just returned home from a beer with Big Dave Thomas (of OTI fame). He gave an excellent and provocative talk on Lean and Agile in the Large that was very well received by an audience that included several of my former Wizard colleages and many involved in the Agile Canberra SIG with me. Former and present Wizards Steve Aldred and David Price spent some time talking to him about Smalltalk past and present after the session and it was great to hear his perspective on what happened and where things might be headed.

It was really surprising to see someone like Dave Thomas in Canberra. This city isn't exactly on the circuit for international speakers in the software development community. It is also great to see him putting his valuable time and energy into the JAOO conferences in Sydney and Brisbane next year. I'm starting to wish that I were still here to attend those...

I am flying out to London tomorrow for the Fall Scrum Gathering where I will be speaking about how we can better share experiences and practical advice about ScrumMastering through 'Smell Guidance'. As part of a related initiative, I am working with the Scrum Alliance on a means for us all to collaboratively author this material. This is the first time that the bi-annual Scrum Gathering has featured a full programme of presentations and I expect this to be very valuable.

I will also be participating in the XPDay event early the following week which features a lot of interactive workshops around eXtreme Programming and Agile practices more generally.

I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to meet and learn from many of the movers and shakers in the global Agile community. Both XP and Scrum were invented on Smalltalk projects so it probably isn't surprising that some of the most notable in the Agile community are Smalltalkers or were involved in developing Smalltalk tools. I'll blog about the experience over here when I get back.

My employer and long term Smalltalk shop, Wizard Information Services, went into receivership almost two weeks ago. This was reported last week in Canberra's primary local paper. This news came as a total shock to nearly everyone that I work with.

Today was D-Day for the staff in the software development group. As a result of the restructuring, more than half of my closest colleagues have been terminated or stood down. This includes some extremely talented Smalltalkers responsible for some cutting-edge technology that we released in early demo form just a few weeks ago to customers like the Library of Congress, the largest non-English archive in the world, the organisation responsible for the Oscars and others. These guys will be looking for a new job in a slow market dominated by .NET with the Government in caretaker mode in the lead up the the Federal election. It seems that there is little chance that they will have an opportunity to use Smalltalk again in this town unless a buyer is found for the software side of the business. It is a sad day.

Here's to a great bunch of Smalltalkers and a great bunch of people.

softwarewithstyle.com is currently down while I switch hosting arrangements and retrieve the SWS server from Wizard premises. I hope to sort this out soon although there are a lot of other things that I am trying to deal with right now. I am also having a problem with mail to my SWS address. Please use rowan_at_wimmler_dot_com for now.

Yesterday I attended the second BarCampSydney event. This is a rather eclectic and free-form "un-conference" at which attendees are encouraged to post a topic to talk about on the day (the slogan is "no spectators"). Perhaps due to the interesting mix of high tech business people, consultants and software developers in attendance, the sessions seemed to fall into three overall categories:

• Web 2.0 trends: Facebook as a platform, social networks etc.
  
• Entrepreneurship: raising venture capital, building tech. businesses  etc.
• Hot software development technology: Ruby, OpenGL, Games programming etc.

The discussions were fast-paced and quite thought-provoking - in some cases involving upwards of 60 people involved in open discussion.

Amongst the more outspoken personalities in the entrepreneurial sessions were several people who have succeeded in building tech. businesses - most involving fund raising through government grants and/or venture capital. One exception is Mike Cannon-Brooks, co-founder and CEO of Atlassian Software. Atlassian is a truly inspiring Aussie success story and many around the world will know of them for their Confluence and JIRA products. Mike is an extremely switched on and passionate guy who really tells it like it is. He was in fine form at the end of the day Mike presented this presentation (1Mb PDF).

Although we are at somewhat of a disadvantage in Australia in terms of most of not being as familiar with the fund raising system as is common in America, there is quite a good network of Aussie ex-pats in Silicon Valley who can make introductions to V.C.'s and the like.

The top blogs for tech entrepreneurs mentioned were:

• Ask the Wizard (Mike's favourite and one to read from the first post right through)
• The Funded
• Venture Hacks

The smallest and most informal session I attended was on Agile and Lean software development. One of the guys there had just returned from the big Agile2007 conference in Washington D.C. I have blogged about that over here.

Generally it was a very interesting and inspiring day. There are plenty of other BarCamps happening around the world and I would recommend them to anyone who wants to connect directly and interactively with where the leading-edge of tech. industry thinking is at.

Well I haven't posted here for 5, approaching 6 months and was about to call it quits on this blog but thought twice about this after (former Software WithStyle and current Wizard colleague) Steve suggested I resurrect it. I had dinner with Michael this evening and his talk about a possible new podcast with James got me back into thinking about blogging here.

The first thing I think I should do is confirm that Software WithStyle is defunct. I didn't want to make too much noise about this until everything was finalised including the company de-registration. That whole process took some months and only concluded a little while back so I feel like it is about time to make a statement and bring some closure to what was a very challenging, exciting and, at times, frustrating experience.

One thing we did do some months back (without much fanfare) was to open source WithStyle. All the source code source code (minus some 3rd party icons etc. that we do cannot grant a license to) is available from softwarewithstyle.com under an MIT license. Remember that this is just a snapshot of the code at the point at which we downed tools on it - half way to WithStyle4 - so certain things are incomplete and both WithStyle3 and WithStyle4 are all lumped in together in that download. We provide no warranties for this code of any sort - use it at your own risk.

Michael handed over admin of the server softwarewithstyle.com is hosted on around that time too so if you have any probs getting to things there you're best off contacting me. If you're playing with WithStyle, I'd be interested to hear about it but note that detailed technical questions about how to get certain things working may not be answered in a timely fashion or at all - none of us are actively working with it these days and we don't have any plans to.

Anyway, I have a small backlog of other things to blog about so hopefully some of that will appear here soon. Stay tuned.