Unimplemented

Spartez Does Street Art

2013-05-09T14:41:00.001+01:00

Ever since we moved to our new office last year, something seemed to be missing. Yes, the new office is bigger, better, more comfortable and better suited for our ever increasing crew than the rudimentary office that we had before. But - the new office did not have any character. If you walked in, you would not be able to tell if you are in Gdansk, Bangalore, San Francisco or St Petersburg. Same beige walls as in any office. Same Aeron chairs. Same grey floor. Same Ikea desks. Even air conditioning has exactly the same controller panel model that I saw in any other office I have ever visited. One word describes it - boring.

As we want to make our company a Great Place To Work, we had to think of something to somehow make the office special.

To this end, we contacted two local street artists - Vera and Julia - to paint some cool graffiti on our walls.

Now our office is different from everybody else's.

Take a Look

Some Details

Artists At Work

BTW, we are still looking for developers (note that we are _very_ picky), so if you would like to work for us, feel free to drop us an e-mail at jobs@spartez.com.

After the party

2012-11-11T15:23:00.002+01:00

So few days ago we hosted a house-warming party in our new, shiny (sorry, I meant, noisy - our neighbours are still finishing their offices) office.

Honestly, I completely did not know what to expect. After all we just throw an invitation at a few places: on Twitter and Facebook obviously, a few posters at local universities, a few mentions at local conferences and users groups ... and a full-fledged bill-board at one of the most crowded street-crossings in Gdańsk.

I did not know who and how many people would sign up. The results far exceeded my dreams. Nearly 90 people signed up, vast majority of them showed up at the event. We hoped to attract 30 - 50 guests, so I dare say it exceed our expectations by far :)
Actually I had to close the registration due to too big interest (I really did not know if we can fit so many people in our 300 m2) more than 2 days before the event and on the quickly opened waiting list we quickly got almost 10 people wanting to join us.

All in all everything went quite smooth. So many people managed to squeeze in our office. Actually we could fit probably 30 - 40 more (in terms of raw floor space), but our air-conditioning barely handled those who showed up (it was really too hot when most of the people were in a single room when I was doing the presentation).

I was afraid that random people would come - e.g. those just interested in having a free drink or a fist fighting ;). Fortunately they were no such guests. It looks like all people were genuinely interested in our company (both Spartez and Atlassian), wanted to share something, learn something (we hosted a few young startupers) or were interested in one of the jobs we are offering.

After initial mingling I presented a few things: a short history of Atlassian with the emphasis of its values and how the attracted us to, a short history of Spartez (including revealing the mystery of how our company was founded and why such name was picked) and then I very quickly presented those several positions for which we are looking for people:

Team Leader
Front-end developers
Java developers (all levels, including our highly wanted principal)
UX engineer
Product manager
QA engineer

BTW, we are still looking (I mentioned we are _very_ picky), so feel free to drop us an e-mail at jobs@spartez.com.

Then there was a time for a lot of questions and honestly I was completely swamped for next hour or so by a lot of people who pinned me down and wanted to know much more. Great conversations. It turned out that there are several people really interested in invigorating our Tricity geek scene. JUGs, JS meetups, Scala meetups, Agile parties, hackathons - we don't have them too often in Gdansk and area. I got a few very good connections and I hope to co-host some interesting meetups in the near future. Stay tuned.

After several more chats, I felt so much tired, that I sneaked out to our fussball table to witness the finals (we did organize the fussball championships - big kudos to Orzech for that) - unfortunately we were not very hospitable here and two Spartez pairs made it to the final.

Then I landed in our poker room where Filip Rogaczewski was ~~cheating~~ winning with other players (of course no gambling, just free chips) in Texas Hold'em. He won also my pool, but finally there was a draw between two last players - they bet with "all in" and both had exactly the same full house. And they gave up further play. Perfect solution.

All in all that was a very pleasant evening. After 10 PM we started heading home.

There were no damages, no beer spilled (but at poker table, which is like a rule), no one got sick. Food was decent, chats were great and the guests were awesome.

Thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope to celebrate with you in the future too.

Special thanks for Spartez crew for organizing and taking care of this event! I owe you guys beer! Help yourself from our fridge. :)
And special kudos to my awesome sister and brother-in-law for taking these wonderful pictures.

House-warming Party in Gdańsk - come chat with us on 5th of November

2012-10-29T15:18:00.001+01:00

On 5th of November we are hosting a House-warming party in our new office.
If you are already our friend, or want to learn more about what we are doing (especially in Atlassian ecosystem) or perhaps if you are looking for a new job - please join us after 5 PM next week. You can find detailed map on our website.

We have announced the event week ago and so far more people have registered than we originally hoped for. Due to space limitations at our venue, we will have to close soon the registration. There are less than 20 slots (free!) left - so hurry up.

Except for having a good time in the evening, we would like to use this opportunity to spread the word that we are hiring.
We are still looking for several talented and passionate guys (who want to work in a very casual environment, with around 30 colleagues locally and millions customers globally).
We are looking most of all for:

Java developers
Javascript/front-end developers
UX Designer
Product Manager
Team Lead (with very strong fresh technical background)

If you are interested, come and talk to us during the event or/and apply via e-mail (jobs@spartez.com) or using this online form (not all jobs may be currently listed there).

We are moving!

2012-09-04T17:23:00.001+01:00

This year we will be celebrating the fifth anniversary of our company. That was a crazy period of time – so much has happened!

From the very beginning we have been very closely cooperating with Atlassian – an awesome Australian company which brought to the world such software masterpieces like JIRA, Confluence, Crucible or Bamboo. We have also provided custom solutions (related to Atlassian products) to many leading Polish and foreign companies. Finally our commercial products have been purchased by several hundred companies from all over the world, including: VISA, Wells Fargo, Warner Bross Games, Siemens, TF SKOK, DB Schenker and Amazon. Wow!

We have been present (speaking and even sponsoring) at dozens of software development conferences and geek meetups in Poland and abroad. I think we have earned some good reputation (and a title of the most picky recruiters in the area).

Over the course of years we have been contributing more and more to Atlassian products and, lo and behold, we proved that we know pretty well how to develop software and slowly by constantly we have been expending our tight partnership with Atlassian.

Now the time has come to make much bigger leap.

Recently together with Atlassian we have hired several new awesome software developers (we are still hiring!). And ... we have finally outgrew our first cosy office – a house in the backyards in the very centre of Gdansk – between Wrzeszcz and Oliwa districts – in Strzyża (Australians claim we are insane with saving so much on vowels :)). Though we love so much this area that we decided to stay in this district and move to a new place very close to our current office.

So this week we are moving to a brand new A class office building – Garnizon Omega building, where we will be one of the first tenants.

That's an awesome place (just look at the pictures – they are real!). Walking distance from trams, SKM (Tricity train), bus tops, 5 - 7 min walk from our biggest shopping mall – Baltic Gallery. And the place is quite silent – 200 or 300 m away from the noise of the main Grunwaldzka street. With New Słowackiego street almost ready (and already available for car traffic) it's also very conveniently located for people commuting from suburbs via Tricity highway (like I do personally). We almost doubled our effective office space there and we hope that it will serve us well for next few years.

We are still a small company (just exceeding 20 people) and we are proud of it. We used to work for big behemoth corporations and we know how much better is to work in a company where everyone knows each other and where things get simply done instead of being talked about. With new people hopefully joining us over the course of next months, we will grow significantly but we are sure we will still maintain the spirit of a cozy company with very few rules (common sense instead) and a great atmosphere. After all, anthropologists believe that a group of people (a tribe) can operate cohesively and efficiently up to 100 (some say even 200) people without too many extra rules, laws and enforced norms. And the lack of rules, laws and enforcement norms is what we really like. We still have a lot of capacity for growth till we even get close to such limit :)

Today we all visited our new office to pick the place for our desks (and see it in reality).

That's not our former office :)

Nope. It's not our new office :). It's a house being dismantled (well demolished) which was on our way. Could not resist taking a picture.

View from our office

One of our open space rooms

A dedicated bicycle lot with 3 showers! Yes, yes, yes!

We are going to organize a housewarming party in September. As the final decoration works are still in progress, we cannot announce the exact date yet. Stay tuned!

Scrum Standup in JIRA and Confluence

2011-12-23T10:52:00.000+01:00

What?

Scrum Standup plugins for JIRA and Confluence have been released.

They are available to download and try from https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/849934

Scrum Standup plugin for JIRA allows to quickly create a daily written standup report and link it with the issues you have worked on. It takes only a minute or two to prepare standup note. Just few clicks and few words - no worries about layout, edit conflicts, issue searching and linking hardness, no too large page kills your browser problem.
Scrum Standup plugin for JIRA contains dedicated view to display all daily standup notes for a project - great place for managers and absent folks.
Built in and configurable email notifications can keep you up to date with the ongoing team progress.

Take a look:

Scrum Standup plugin for Confluence allows to retrieve standup notes from JIRA and display them on the Confluence page. It gives you everything you need to familiarize yourself with the team progress on a single wiki page. Just open and read.

Screenshots:

Scrum Standup plugins for JIRA and Confluence are ready to download and try from https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/849934

Why?

There are two problems we want to solve with Scrum Standup plugins

Problem 1: Gather people together for a daily standup meeting.

Let's imagine following scenario.

You are a part of a team which uses JIRA for issue tracking. The team is small, agile and try to practice Scrum. You have a sprint planning meeting every two weeks when you prioritize backlog and estimate user stories, you try to meet every day on a short standup meeting so everyone in the team is up to date with others work, you perform a demo and sprint retrospective at the end of iteration. All of that helps your team to work smarter with no additional effort. Sweet... but what if:

One or more of your team members work remotely and your team is dispersed.
Part of your team works in a different timezone and there are 9 hours of difference.
Some of the team members are 'burn the midnight oil' geeks and start work in the afternoon.
People get sick or their kids get sick and they work from home for a few days.
Someone started to build a house of dream and works in totally unpredictable manner.
There are other reasons which make it difficult to gather people together every day at specified time.

In terms of sprint planning or retrospective meetings it is not a big problem. They happen once a week, biweekly or even more rarely so it is not very painful to gather people and perform video or Skype meeting. People tend to agree for an afternoon or very early morning meeting if it happens no more than once a week. They can get up early this day, take a baby sitter and deal with their private stuff another day. No big deal.

Scrum standup meeting is a different story. It happens daily so if you run into one of the listed above cases it may be impossible to gather the team together at the same time everyday.
There are many solutions:

Reorganize your project and team so there are no remote folks.
Run Scrum of Scrums.
Meet your remote product owner once a week instead of every day.
Start daily standup meeting even if half of the team is absent.
Run daily standup meeting before lunch when most of your staff is there.

Anything can be a solution. If you found it, people are happy and project is going smoothly then you are lucky and can stop reading here. You probably don't need anything more.

If nothing works or you are simply not satisfied how the things go then written reports and Scrum Standup plugin may be an answer.

Problem 2: What was done yesterday.

Have you ever run into one of the following?

You missed last standup meeting or even worse, you were sick for a few days and feel that you don't know the current state of the project.
You get back to work and want to know what happened when you were off.
You have a problem and remember that someone fixed similar thing a week ago. Unfortunately your remote team is sleeping right now and you can't find who was that and how to find a fix among tens of SCM commits.

Again there are many ways to deal with the problem:

Check activity stream of your JIRA project.
Go through SCM commits.
Use JIRA search to find the correct issue or comment.
Use Assembla/Github/Bitbucket search to find the right commit.

If it works for you in all cases and you feel you don't need anything more just stop reading here.

If it does not work or you feel you miss something, written reports and Scrum Standup plugin may be an answer again.

That's why we decided to create Scrum Standup plugins for JIRA and Confluene.

You can download and try them from https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/849934
Bugs and feature requests can be raised at: https://jira.spartez.com/jira/browse/SSJ

Enjoy,
Scrum Standup team.

Approver Plugin For Confluence

2011-10-10T10:21:00.002+01:00

Atlassian Confluence is a fine product, but so far it has been lacking an important feature - there was no way to show your approciation of somebody's contributions (pages, blog posts, even comments), other than by commenting on them. This was in stark contract with places like Google+ or Facebook, where you can simply click a "+1" or "Like" button to quickly say that you like what somebody said.

To address that, we have created a simple, but powerful Confluence plugin - the Approver.

This plugin adds a widget to your Confluence pages, in a form of a "Thumbs up" button with a small counter. When you click this button, you annnounce to everybody that can read the page that you "approve" ("like", "+1") the content just above it. The widget appears at the bottom of every page, as well as next to each comment. Whan you click the button, it turns to blue, so that you know whether or not you already "approved". When you click the counter, you are shown a list of everybody who also "approved"

But wait, there is more. In addition to this button, Approver can optionally add Google+'s "+1" and Facebook's "Like" buttons to every page or comment. This lets you share your opinions about the content with the whole world. Enable and use these with caution though - they expose your Confluence URLs (but not the content) to everybody on Google+ or Facebook. So if you consider these URLs secret, you should disable this option.

Approver can be downloaded from our web page at http://approver.spartez.com/, or from Atlassian Plugin Exchange

Here are some screenshots of Approver in action

closeup of all buttons on a page

full page with Approver buttons and approvers list

Eclipse mysteries

2011-07-18T14:13:00.004+01:00

Do you use Eclipse? Have you faced below error and don't know what is going on? Google does not help?

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2 0 2011-07-15 05:06:39.766
!MESSAGE The following is a complete list of bundles which are not resolved, see the prior log entry for the root cause if it exists:
!SUBENTRY 1 org.eclipse.osgi 2 0 2011-07-15 05:06:39.766
!MESSAGE Bundle org.eclipse.jdt.apt.pluggable.core_1.0.400.v20110305-1450 [107] was not resolved.
!SUBENTRY 2 org.eclipse.jdt.apt.pluggable.core 2 0 2011-07-15 05:06:39.766
!MESSAGE Missing imported package org.eclipse.jdt.internal.compiler.tool_0.0.0.
!SUBENTRY 2 org.eclipse.jdt.apt.pluggable.core 2 0 2011-07-15 05:06:39.767
!MESSAGE Missing imported package org.eclipse.jdt.internal.compiler.apt.dispatch_0.0.0.
!SUBENTRY 2 org.eclipse.jdt.apt.pluggable.core 2 0 2011-07-15 05:06:39.767
!MESSAGE Missing imported package org.eclipse.jdt.internal.compiler.apt.model_0.0.0.
!SUBENTRY 2 org.eclipse.jdt.apt.pluggable.core 2 0 2011-07-15 05:06:39.767
!MESSAGE Missing imported package org.eclipse.jdt.internal.compiler.apt.util_0.0.0.
!SUBENTRY 1 org.eclipse.osgi 2 0 2011-07-15 05:06:39.767
!MESSAGE Bundle org.eclipse.jdt.compiler.apt_1.0.400.v0110509-1300 [109] was not resolved.
!SUBENTRY 2 org.eclipse.jdt.compiler.apt 2 0 2011-07-15 05:06:39.767
!MESSAGE Missing optionally imported package org.eclipse.jdt.internal.compiler.tool_0.0.0.
!SUBENTRY 1 org.eclipse.osgi 2 0 2011-07-15 05:06:39.767
!MESSAGE Bundle org.eclipse.jdt.compiler.tool_1.0.100.v_B61 [110] was not resolved.
!SUBENTRY 2 org.eclipse.jdt.compiler.tool 2 0 2011-07-15 05:06:39.767
!MESSAGE Missing Constraint: Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment: JavaSE-1.6

Stay calm and do not try to solve above dependency problem. In 99.99% it is a side effect of another problem, even if you can't see anything special in your log at first sight.

Have a cup of coffee or bottle of beer if you can and relax.

Next go through your log again. Look for some suspicious warnings as well as innocent info messages located in the nearby. It may be everything, file system permission problem, ant issue or any other stuff totally unrelated to the org.eclipse.jdt imports and dependencies.

Write a comment if my post helped to solve your case.

Simple web based time reporting with MrTickTock 1.3

2011-07-15T08:29:00.016+01:00

MrTickTock 1.3 has been released and published at http://mrticktock.com.

What's new?

In this version we have added comprehensive time reports creation capability to our cool and small agile time tracker.

The previous Reports section was very simple and limited and many users complained about it. Therefore we have added several enhancements and now users can create a report in three easy steps:

Select date range.

There are several predefined items like current week/month/year, previous week/month/year, last 7 days, etc. as well as custom date range selection.

Select projects which should be included in the report.

All tasks from the selected projects are included in the report. In version 1.7 we will introduce billable task concept and allow to create reports for all the tasks or only for the billable ones.

Select type of grouping.

It is a crucial setting which defines how the report will look like. There are several options available which we believe covers 99% of use cases. Users can group report entries by date, tasks, projects and customers. Combined options are also available.

There is no users selection as we decided it would be a redundant step. Report automatically contains all users involved in the selected project in the selected date range.

Export to CSV is another useful part of Reports section. It works fine with MS Office, Open Office and other office tools. It is really helpful for users who want to decorate report with their own comments and calculations.

Other changes in MrTickTock 1.3:

First created task (for new users) is automatically set as Default Task and marked wit yellow star (default task is used by Windows Sidebar gadget and will be used by mobile applications for automatic time tracking).
Windows Sidebar gadget has now auto-refresh feature (set to 5 minutes) and clickable logo which opens online time sheet in the browser.
Several other small improvements and bug fixes.

What's next?

Version 1.4 will bring Remote Stand-up feature. There will be possibility to add public comment to every time report as well as a sick leave and a day off. We will introduce separate view to present all of that nicely as a daily time report for a project. It should be extremely useful for team collaboration.
It will also work for managers who are not familiar with Scrum and Agile practices but care about team progress and project condition on a daily basis.

That's all for today folks. I hope you will like MrTickTock as much as I do. It is getting more and more useful and awesome every release.

You can check the road-map and backlog in our JIRA.

We publish most recent news via Twitter

Enjoy,
MrTickTock team

Simple web based time tracking with MrTickTock 1.2

2011-06-06T13:48:00.006+01:00

MrTickTock 1.2 has been released. As usually it brings bunch of useful features and improvements. It is published at http://mrticktock.com.

What's new?

Track time with 'Start Work' and 'Stop Work' buttons

The most expected feature is now live. If you constantly forget your work start time or you switch tasks quite often you will like this feature. Simply press 'Start Work' button at the beginning of your work and 'Stop Work' at the end. MrTickTock will automatically save your exact work time. You will be able to edit calculated time report if you need.

You don't have to keep your browser open as the start work time is saved on the server side. You can freely restart your computer or open MrTickTok page in another browser and your start work time will be there.
Change task order with drag & drop

It is really awesome feature. We haven't seen it in any other time reporting tool. You can simply drag your task, move it up or down on the list and drop in the position you like. It is a cool way to have your favourite tasks at the top of the list.
Windows desktop gadget

Do you use Windows 7 or Vista? Do you like desktop gadgets? If yes then install our new gadget which allows to report time in a second right from your Windows desktop.
Simple UI improvements and bug fixes

We constantly apply small changes to our application to make it more user friendly, more obvious and easier to use.

What's next?

Version 1.3 will focus on reports. We plan to make them really usable by adding grouping and CSV export. It should be released in the middle of June.

Remote stand-up feature will appear in the version 1.4 scheduled for the beginning of July.
We practice SCRUM a lot (also in remote teams) and having an agile time tracker with remote stand-up support could be really beneficial.
We will also create Confluence plugin to show all the stand-up entries on the wiki page.

You can check the road-map and backlog in our JIRA.

We publish most recent news via Twitter

Enjoy,
MrTickTock team

Simple web based vacation tracking with MrTickTock 1.1

2011-04-16T12:09:00.017+01:00

MrTickTock 1.1 has been released. It brings bunch of useful features and improvements. Everything is available at http://mrticktock.com.

What's new?

Vacation tracking

Our small time tracker is now also a vacation tracker. Users can easily set day and week as Off or Sick which is marked on a time sheet with a nice background color. Light yellow color together with small sun icon means that user is off and hopefully has a sunny vacation time. Light pink color together with small red cross icon means that user is sick.

List of absent team mates for the current day and week is visible right below the time sheet table.

There is no integration with Google calendar at the time but it is still on our road-map and should appear quite soon. We will also add support for vacation request-approve process which is often used in larger companies.
Gravatar integration

It allows users to see their avatar pictures across the application.
Reminder emails

Users can get email message at the end of day if they forget to report time. We do not send reminders on weekends and days marked as Off. Reminder emails can be completely disabled.
Time zone support

Current day on the time sheet page is highlighted according to the user's time zone and reminder emails are sent at 6pm of user's time.

Version 1.1 contains few other improvements and fixes. As usually the full list of changes can be found in our JIRA.

What's next?

Version 1.2 will bring additional improvements on the time sheet page, mobile view and possibility to track time with start and stop buttons (asked by few customers). It should be released at the end of the May.

Remote stand-up feature will appear in the version 1.3 scheduled for the middle of June.

You can check the road-map and backlog in our JIRA.

We publish most recent news via Twitter

Enjoy,
MrTickTock team

My take on 33degree - a new software conference which may soon rule the world

2011-04-11T17:30:00.003+01:00

Last week I attended a new software development conference – 33degree which took place in wonderful Krakow – home city of the organizer – Grzegorz Duda.

Executive summary:

Awesome conference. The best in Poland I've ever been to.

Here is why:

Speakers

Great names, great presentations (I am not talking here about the slides), energetic, well prepared, but spontaneous. Neal Ford, Ted Neward, awesome Venkat Subramaniam, Simon Ritter, Michael Nygard, Nathanial Schutta and many more – hall of fame.
Keynotes

Most of the talks were great. Great thing about keynotes was that half of them were at the end of the conference – on Friday afternoon. Contrary to Devoxx, where Friday is usually a wasted day and everyone thinks how to reach home, 33degree.org was culminating to the very end. Everyone who left the conference before 6:30 PM is a loser.
The level of abstraction

Probably one of the biggest positive astonishments for me. I was afraid that the conference will be yet another place where most of sessions will treat about some APIs, libraries, fancy tools – things which come and go and in a year or two few will remember about it. However Grzesiek did an awesome thing – a lot of sessions were more universal. They were about fundamental things like the brain, common sense, self-development, hygiene, values, methodologies – things which are useful for years (if not entire life).
Venue

Best Western Premium Krakow hotel, where the conference took place was the exact place needed. Configurable rooms of the appropriate size, a lot of comfortable space (sofas) to rest and talk, good hallway were the sponsor's booths and the bookstore were located. There is one problem with this place – I suspect that next year 33degree, due to its awesomeness, will attract far more attendees (than about 400 this year) and the venue may be too small...
Bookstore

A lot of great books with 40% discount. Damn, they were cheaper than on Amazon :)

The sessions which I attended:

Deception and Estimation by Linda Rising – quite good talk, but a little bit too slow. Several good observations about human nature and why people underestimate tasks.

Comparing JVM Web Frameworks by Matt Raible – an interesting comparison about currently available web frameworks. Not all, but the most popular ones. The author gathered a lot of statistics about the activity, job trends and usage of each framework. Spring MVC, Rails and GWT lead. Conclusions: there is no best framework – it depends on what you need. However don't use dinosaurs like Struts 1.

Hacking Your Brain for Fun and Profit by Nathaniel Schutta – definitely one of the best talks at the conference. A lof ot universal wisdom about our brain, our nature, our biology.

A CEOs hearing this talk would probably introduce mandatory naps :). Main points: every person have different biological rhythm. Try to accept it. Some are most productive in the day, some in the morning, some in the night. Having even a short afternoon nap (25 minutes) can improve your effectiveness by 1/3. People who exercise have significantly better performance and their brains work better.

Ideas: how about introducing walking meets or even a walking working place (think about a threadmill under your table fixed and the standing position).

Advice: Avoid meetings at around 3 PM. That's the worst time for most of the people.

Nathaniel wrapped up his talk with great points about distractions, information overlead and the need of focusing. Your attention (this your time) is your most precious resource. Don't waste it. Be selective. Don't try to know everything and be everything (selective ignorance). Be shallow horizontally, but select a subject which you are passionate about it and be deep about it. All interruptions kill you. Respect this fact when you interrupt your colleagues.

Get 'em before they get you by Hamlet D'Arcy. Good talk by a passionate guy. The problem was that I probably knew too well IntelliJ (IntelliJ rocks!) and I didn't learn there anything new but an awesome @Language annotation supported by IntelliJ which allows you to write you code snippets (auto completion, syntax highlighting work) in other languages in your Java file.

The official schedule of the first day was wrapped up with beer served by ZeroTurnaround. Big thanks folks!

State of Scala by Venkat Subramaniam – live coding demos were really convincing. Scala is great, but I am afraid it may suffer from C++ syndrome – the language too powerful complicated for an average mortal to master. Stream as lazy collections and views look awesome. Venkat made a great job showing just the peak of the iceberg of the whole power of Scala.

Fractal TDD: Using tests to drive system design by Steve Freeman was the only session which disappointed me at this conference. Slow, boring with unclear goal. I left it after 30 minutes, so perhaps I missed something important and I my evaluation is to harsh.

I moved to Dan Allen's talk about Arquillian and it was the right decision. That tool/library really intrigued me. Putting your tests (writing like unit tests but with the power of being integration or system-level tests) easily inside any container – that looks great. I am going to give it a try. Also JBoss ShinkWrap looks like an awesome tool to make your tests really isolated.

HTML 5 Fact and Fiction by Nathaniel Schutta was another flawless session by this speaker. Entertaining, interesting, energetic. HTML 5 is coming, it has already come. Mobile devices need it and embraced it. When desktop web browsers will fully pick it up, the Internet world we know will change. And Adobe should be afraid of this change as there is no place for it's Flash there...

Advice: use modernizr.com and feature detection (instead of user agent sniffing) to selectively support HTML5 features until they are ubiquitous.

Programming Clojure by Venkat Subramaniam – more live coding demos – this time in Clojure. I felt good again immersed into Lisp world, which I haven't used since my university time. A great introduction to this language. Again Venkat was awesome – the best part of this presentation.

Agile UI by Nathaniel Shutta – the 3^rd great performance by Nathaniel. Not sure if he or Venkat was top speaker at the conference. But never mind, both were truly awesome. World class. Devoxx or JavaOne do not have better speakers. Main points taken: focus groups suck wrt designing UI/UX. Don't trust what customers say they do. Observe what they really do with the software. UI is the system for the end user. The back-end/middleware does not count. Customers deserve better Uis.

3^rd day started from Karl Rehmer's talk about How Debuggers Work. I was late a little bit, so I cannot honestly rate the entire talk. However I left a little bit unsatiated. The part about Java debugger was to shallow. I hoped to learn more about it – especial some practical hints, whereas the author admitted that he did not have the practical experience with Java.

Simon Ritter again did not disappoint. He made an excellent talk even from such theoretically boring subject like The Future of the Java Platform – about incoming and ever-promised Java 7 and 8. They are finally coming. Java 7 this year. Java 8 at the end of 2011. Having eaten lunch with Simon I even know the exact dates :) It's good that finally Oracle improves the language. Most of the changes around project Coin are good. However I feel disappointed how Closeable will work when you decide to add your own finally block. We will see in practice though how they are used. With Java 6 being EOLed early next year, I hope that Java 7 features will be picked up quickly.

Simon convincingly explained the general strategy about Java as a language and why it will never have some features which are being added to other sexy languages like Groovy or Scala. Java is to be a simple, comprehensible and clear language for masses. Where reading is more important than writing, thus being succinct is not an important asset (but often a drawback – like in Perl)

The last session before lunch and ending keynotes was Matthew McCullough introduction to Hadoop. Good, informative session. Matthew honestly explained what Hadoop is good for and what it's not. Technologies like Hadoop is definitely something and experienced software developer should be aware of and be ready to apply it when the need arises.

The conference was wrapped up with 3 awesome keynotes keeping you breathless till the very end.

Firstly, Neal Ford in his Abstraction Distractions analyzed why all abstractions leak and what we should do with it (i.e. accept it and move elsewhere if it hurts us too badly). He explained how and why composable and onionskin APIs are a great way to handle abstractions.

Abstractions, when internalized, are very difficult to fight with (e.g. think about floppy icon used for saving file/document – when most of the people have not used floppies for years now).

Neal explained also why so many people hate Maven whereas some of people still love it. The abstraction introduced by Maven is great for a lot of people (especially initially), until they needs get very sophisticated and the abstraction starts leaking tremendously. Then you start fiercely to hate it. And then you should move to another solution which provides a good abstraction for your current needs.

The same goes for Hibernate and a lot of other technologies trying to abstract away some concepts.

Very good and deep talk.

Michael Nygard with a more scientific approach talked about architecting for scale. Amdahl's Law extended by including the time/cost needed to reconcile the state of the parallel tasks may actually lead to decreasing the overall performance when adding more computing nodes. Michael explained what kind of approach typical medium and high-scale systems (millions+ transactions per second) need to use to cope with the scale. He also explained the tradeoff between Consistency, Availability and Partition-Tolerance in high-scale systems, where usually the consistency is something which is the most reasonable to sacrifice. Summing up: there is no best architecture. Everything depends on the context.

Probably the most entertaining and energetic talk was delivered by Venkat Subramaniam in his session about Polyglot Programmer. For Venkat being a polyglot is mostly about extending the perspective and the toolbox of a developer while working even on another language (boring like Java). You should learn not another similar language to the one you already know (e.g. C# when you know Java), but hurt yourself with mastering completely different language (with a different paradigm) like Closure or Scala. Only then you really extend your capabilities and the perception. Venkat made a great point about why everyone thinks that unit testing is vital, but so few daily practice it (or TDD). It's like exercising. We suck at things which require discipline and which do not have immediate consequences.

Venkat, you rock!

The conference was closed by Ted's Neward show about Rethinking Enterprise. There a lot of fun there and mockery wrt meritocracy. Main point: do not follow best practices. Best practices are switching off your brain. A best practice is meaningless without the context and every project is different and has a different context. You have to think. Otherwise you suck! It's stupid to quarrel that one technology rocks and the other sucks. Everything has its place and depends on the situation. We are paid to think and to apply our judgment after understanding the problem and not by merely following good practices (which should become a “vomit word”.

Personally I gave a talk about using agile values and practices in a non-software project – like a house building. I also hosted a BoF about agile contracts. Both sessions attracted around 40 – 50 people. Drop me a comment if you like it and how I could improve it.

A few things which could be improved (there is always some space for improvement):

Adding sessions shorter than 1 hour – some sessions could easily fit into 45 minutes or less. I find 45 minutes more challenging for the speaker and yet more existing and dense for most of the sessions. Perhaps more variety in the schedule (also including 5 - 15 min lightning talks) could farther improve the essence of the conference.
Having more non-Polish attendees would make Polish less ubiquitous during the break. I heard from non-Polish attendees that it was somewhat intimidating. And this conference definitely deserves to be seen as an international event – great and affordable for people from Germany, Austria, Czech, Slovakia, Russia, Ukraine and many more. Krakow has awesome net of direct connections (operated by low cost airlines) with a lot of cities (including London) so it's a great destination for most people from Europe. I hope that we will all market this conference next year outside Polish borders too.
Award/prize drawing was quite messy. Usually absent people are excluded if they are drafted. Here they were not. It definitely would help to maintain the focus till the very end of the conference.
The name and logo: 33degree.org has a name not related to Java or software development. Actually I turned out that it's a highest level of mastery for masons. Personally I'd rather leave masons where they are. I really think that it's easier to convince a boss to send you to a conference whose name relates to software concepts. The logo also sucked a little bit – offending (in terms of religion) to some people
Some logistics quirks – like no timetable at the door to each conference room, not printed rooms for last day in the brochure
Unconference hours competing with keynotes. Keynotes were too good. I love unconferences but it was really difficult to attend them when keynotes were taking place.

To sum up:

33degree is a place you have to be next year. I have already heard that awesome speakers are coming next year too. Will we have in Poland a conference which may successfully compete with Devoxx. I hope!

Standing ovation for Grzegorz Duda, all the awesome speakers and all the crowd which made this conference happen!

Simple web based time tracking with MrTickTock 1.0

2011-03-12T08:55:00.016+01:00

MrTickTock 1.0 has been released. After 2 months of coding we moved from the beta to final version. Actually it is a new version which contains much more improvements and new features than fixes.

What's new?

We improved UX significantly, mostly on the time sheet page where users spend most of the time:

It has a new layout with highlighted current day.
We use AJAX there to make interaction with the page very natural. Time entries are saved automatically so there is no need for Save button and no chance to loose unsaved time entries.
Changed and recalculated values on the page are nicely highlighted with yellow and slowly faded to their original color so you will not miss them.
Shortcut keys allow to go from day to day and from task to task in an easy way. You can also jump to the current day and move week forward and backward quickly.

Task Manager has been also significantly improved. It is much easier now to manage customers, projects and tasks.

We have a totally new home page for MrTickTock. It contains our latest tweets and brief overview of the project. More detailed description is available on the features page. You can find there not only list of the main features but also information on the coming stuff.

Version 1.0 contains several other improvements which you may like. In order to get the full list of changes you can visit our JIRA installation or simply take a look how new MrTickTock looks in real at http://mrticktock.com.

What's next?

The next release will bring vacation tracking (possibly integrated with Google Calendar), gravatar integration, reminder emails and few other improvements. The release of MrTickTock 1.1 is scheduled for the middle of April.

Version 1.2 will bring additional improvements on the time sheet page, mobile view and possibility to track time with start and stop buttons (asked by few customers).
Another important feature will be a remote stand-up facility. It will allow users to add a public note to every time report and share that information as a SCRUM stand-up to their peers and customers. We want to make MrTickTock much more usable than just simple time tracker. We would love to support agile practices and help people conduct their business.
Version 1.2 should be available at the beginning of June.

Version 1.3 will focus on Reports.

You can check the roadmap and backlog at our JIRA.

We publish most recent news via Twitter

Enjoy,
MrTickTock team

Blog post about MetingRoom at Atlassian Blog Site

2011-01-06T19:53:00.010+01:00

Atlassian has posted a guest blog written by us about MeetingRoom and how it integrates with their JIRA and Confluence. Go read it

Internationalizing Atlassian Plugin - Fun With Javascript And REST

2011-01-01T15:26:00.000+01:00

The Problem

Internationalization has always been a bit of a challenge. Internationalizing plugins for Atlassian products is no exception, even though Atlassian developers devoted quite a lot of thought and effort to making your job easy. If your plugin only exposes "static" user interface through velocity templates, you are mostly in luck. The situation is worse if you want to do the modern thing and go wild with javascript and ajax to make your plugin look and feel modern and sexy.

Javascript support for i18n in Atlassian plugins is still a bit of a hack. You typically have to perform the following steps to internationalize your texts:

define all your texts in property files, then translate these texts into whatever language you want your plugin be available in
put all these strings as hidden <input type="hidden"> in a <fieldset> in your velocity template
refer to these hidden input fields in your javascript code using AJS.params()

There are quite a few problems with this:

it is a pretty ugly hack, requiring double lookups - first from a text to its property key, then (in another place in code) from the property key to hidden input field name
the hidden input fields unnecessarily clutter your velocity template and the resulting HTML file
sometimes you have no velocity template to put strings in, because you are not invoking javascript from any static file that you control. Instead, you attach your javascript as a resource through a context (web-resource), or using a filter (servlet-filter). In this case, there is no way to create hidden input fields you could refer to

Fortunately, there is a better way. Not only it lets you get rid of the ugly "hidden input" hack, but also allows referring to texts using their property file key - just like in Java code.

The Solution

My solution to the problem consists of the following steps:

define all your texts in property files - just as before
expose your internationalized property file from a REST resource
in your javascript, retrieve the property file into a hashtable using REST call
refer to the texts in javascript by their property file key

Property file

Then add a js.properties file somewhile in your plugin's resources and add your strings to it, as usual:

first.key=First text
second.key=Second text

You will use localized version of this file to internationalize your plugin - e.g. js_pl_PL.properties file will be used for for Polish locale.

REST Part

First create a REST component in your atlassian-plugin.xml file:

<rest key="rest-endpoint"
      name="REST Component"
      path="/path-to-rest"
      version="1.0">
     <description>Provides the REST resource for my plugin.</description>
</rest>

Now it is time to expose the contents of the properties file from your REST component.

You need REST resource class:

@Path("endpoint")
@Consumes({MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON})
@Produces({MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON})
public class MyRestResource {
    private static final ResourceBundle bundle
        = ResourceBundle.getBundle("path.to.properties.file.js");

    @GET
    @Path("i18n")
    @Consumes({MediaType.WILDCARD})
    @Produces({MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON})
    public Response getI18n() {
        List<I18NStringRepresentation> result =
           new ArrayList<I18NStringRepresentation>();
        for (String key : bundle.keySet()) {
            result.add(new I18NStringRepresentation(key, bundle.getString(key)));
        }
        return Response.ok(new I18NStringsRepresentation(result)).build();
    }
}

and two classes to wrap internationalized strings:

@XmlRootElement
public class I18NStringsRepresentation {
    @XmlElement private List<I18NStringRepresentation> strings
       = new ArrayList<I18NStringRepresentation>();

    public I18NStringsRepresentation() {}
    public I18NStringsRepresentation(List<I18NStringRepresentation> strings) {
        this.strings = strings;
    }
}

@XmlRootElement
public class I18NStringRepresentation {
    @XmlElement private String key;
    @XmlElement private String value;

    public I18NStringRepresentation() {}
    public I18NStringRepresentation(String key, String value) {
        this.key = key;
        this.value = value;
    }
}

And now the javascript part

(function() {
    var i18n_strings = [];

    AJS.$(document).ready(function() {
        var endpoint =
            contextPath
            + '/rest/rest-endpoint/1.0/endpoint/i18n'
            + '?dummy=' + new Date().getTime(); // make IE not cache responses
        AJS.$.ajax({
            type: "GET",
            url: endpoint,
            success: function(data, status, xhr) {
                for (var i = 0; i < data.strings.length; ++i) {
                    i18n_strings[data.strings[i].key] = data.strings[i].value;
                }
                continueWithYourJavascriptStartupTasks();
            },
        });
    });
}());

After this bit of initialization, you are able to refer to internationalized strings from your javascript by their propert file key, just as you do in your Java code or in your velocity template:

    alert(i18n_strings['first.key']); 
    AJS.$('#somediv').html(i18n_strings['second.key']);

Simple web based time and vacation tracking with MrTickTock

2010-12-27T09:04:00.011+01:00

Prologue

We finally did it. After three months of coding we are proud to announce that MrTickTock 1.0-Beta has been released (one week ago) and is ready to track your time at mrticktock.com. Although it is in beta condition we consider it a stable and production ready system and we use it to track our internal time. Therefore you may ask why we released it as a beta version. There are two reasons:
* we still want to improve set of stuff and make MrTickTock even more user friendly and awesome,
* we would love people use it, test it and share their ideas on what we should change before 1.0-Final release.

Why MrTickTock?

We observed lack of simple, decent and affordable employee time tracking solutions. Most of them require user to download piece of software and install it locally which is not the way small and agile company wants to go (not to mention startups). The existing online solutions are either expensive or have really poor UX and all of them lack of the key feature: vacation tracking :)

What is MrTickTock?

MrTickTock is designed to be simple, fast and secure online solution to track employee time in an efficient way. It is completely free. You don't have to download, install or configure anything. Just sing up in less then 20 seconds and start tracking your time.
We may introduce affordable paid plans for bigger groups and companies some day in the future but don't worry. It will be still free for small companies, individuals and freelancers. Paid accounts will also stay free for already signed users for at least one year.

Evolution?

We know that there are number of people and companies still using Excel as a substitute for dedicated time tracking software. We even know big companies (thousands of employees) using Excel to track vacation time. Isn't it ridiculous? This is why we work so hard to improve MrTickTock UX and add extra features to make their life easier. Here is what we want to release soon:
* save/report time with ajax (no more save button and lost entries),
* new look & feel for customer/project/task structure,
* mobile view,
* vacation tracking,
* billing/invoice,
* IM time tracking,
* improved reports,
* remote SCRUM stand-ups.

Epilogue

If you read this blog post it probably means that you are looking for a decent web based time tracker. Therefore you should give MrTickTock a try at mrticktock.com. The next release in January will bring new prime quality - you will love it.

Stay in touch with MrTickTock and follow us on Twitter:
We will post there news of improvements, new features and releases.

Best,
MrTickTock team

Devoxx 2010 Impressions

2010-11-22T12:29:00.002+01:00

Devoxx 2010 took place in Metropolis centre in Antwerp, as usual.

We stayed in the same hotel as 2 years ago, took the same route there, helped Atlassians distribute beer during Java Posse live session (again), listened to talks about what is coming to the Java 7 that is supposed to be "real soon now (tm)" (again) - it really felt like it was a few days since I was at Devoxx last time, not 2 years :-)

Buzz

It might be just my impression, but the focus seems to have changed from Agile and Testing (2 years ago) to Cloud and friends.

I haven't seen any talk about how important it is to be agile, test first, pair program etc. No new and exciting testing frameworks, methodologies, ideas to share.
Either it's just not trendy any more or it has become so mainstream that nobody bothers to talk about it.
Personally I think it's the latter, especially having IBM give away books about 'Rational Agile' :-)

This year every other talk was either about writing software for the cloud, different flavours of the cloud itself (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) or NoSQL databases that you would like to use on your cloud.

If you judged by the topics of the talks, you might come to conclusion that nobody uses desktop computers any more - neither for native apps nor for the Web.
It seems that the only choice you need to make is whether you write your app as a native iOS/Android/RIM/Symbian/Whatever app or you decide to go for HTML5 or similar solution.
The vote during one of the talks indicated that if you were one of the persons present at the talk, you either have a smartphone and raised your hand or were too busy checking your email on your phone and didn't notice the question.
The developer community at the conference might not be the best statistical population, but the trend indicates that very soon the smartphones will be the primary computation and communication platform - probably more important than the desktops or dumb phones.

Java 7/8

I wonder if it was the fact that Sun was bought by Oracle the cause of so huge delay in release of new Java or was it the other way round - Sun's inability to produce any progress caused Oracle to buy them out.

The next generation of Java was divided to 2 stages:
- Java 7, due early 2011
- Java 8, due late 2013 (if I remember the dates correctly)

Java 7 would contain all stuff that is feature complete already, all the other stuff goes to Java 8.

The most important announcement (for me) was Lambda methods and Single Abstract Method pattern to solve closures in Java.
It's simple and elegant enough to reduce code verbosity, still clever enough not to break backward compatibility at all. You can actually start writing your closure-enabled APIs right away (if you haven't already at the time of Java 1.0 :-) )

Google for "openjdk project lambda" or see this blogpost.

The bad news is that if it finally goes to Java 8 in 2013, and the adoption rate will be similar to what we see now (I still need to write code for JDK1.5, and I'm happily not supporting JDK1.4 for 2 years...), it won't really matter. I will either be using some other language (Scala maybe?) or be already retired ;-)

All I hope is that when I go to Devoxx in 2 years, I won't be attending the "What is coming in the Java 7 soon" sessions again.

Parleys

I wasn't able to attend all sessions that I wanted to see, so parleys.com is the place for me to go.
If you don't know the site yet, you definitely need to see it. It contains all the Devoxx talks (and a few other) for free if you don't mind waiting some time to see them, or right after the conference for a relatively small subscription fee.
It seems to be overloaded now, maybe everybody who haven't managed to fit in the room for Josh Bloch "Performance Anxiety" talk are hammering the page to see it :-)

Daily Scrum Standups for Distributed Teams with Spartez MeetingRoom

2010-11-03T13:20:00.002+01:00

With the raise of Agile methodologiles, pretty much every development team these days practices daily standup meetings. And not just development teams do that - for example I have seen standups being used successfully by marketing teams. Which is a good thing, as standup meeting is one of the most powerful tools for improving team efficiency, sense of common goals, sharing knowledge and maintaining team spirit.

Just as everything in agile world, daily standups are short, timeboxed, to the point and lightweight. Every team member basically answers three simple questions:

what have I done since the last standup?
what am I going to do in the immediate future?
what obstacles are in my way?

Plain and simple. Three questions, one minute per person, awesome way to kick-off the team every morning.

There is a problem though. Even though agile methodologies suggest that teams should not be distributed, a lot of teams are. Team members are scattered around the globe, in multiple and distant time zones. This makes setting up a daily face-to-face meeting quite a complicated task. Teleconferencing systems (or even simple solutions like Skype) help a bit, but they are not perfect. For one, the time zone problem is difficult to overcome - the meeting that is a start-of-a-day event for some is a let's-have-it-done-and-go-home thing for others. Some team members are tired, others are fresh. Expectations vary, team members do not concentrate on the same thing.

Here is where our MeetingRoom application can help. If you set up a chatroom for the team in MeetingRoom, team members get a convenient way to answer the three standup questions, using a simple /standup command. When a team member is done with a task, they can go to MeetingRoom's IM interface and type something along the lines of:

/standup short description of the completed task

This broadcasts the message to all other team members, and also stores the entry in the MeetingRoom's database. You can also use /standup todo and /standup obstacle, to report intended work and obstacles respectively.

You can report your work multiple times a day and your reports will be aggregated.

If you prefer web browser to IM clients, you can also answer standup questions using MeetingRoom's web interface.

Of course, reporting is possible. You can view daily standup reports (using multiple criteria to select reports you are interested in) in the IM windows well as in the MeetingRoom's web interface. And with a minimum amount of additional setup, you can export your reports to Atlassian Confluence.

Need to embed chat in Confluence - MeetingRoom Lite to the rescue

2010-10-19T18:56:00.000+01:00

If you are a user of Atlassian Confluence, you might have wished every now and then to be able to augment a Confluence page or a blog post with a chat service.

Because sometimes, the discussion in the blog post comments resembles more a quick and dirty IM session than a disciplined exchange of thoughts, worthy of permament storage on the server.

Or maybe you are using some Confluence pages as workspace area, where a real-time collaboration occurs? A chat service would also be extremely handy in such circumstances.

Well, now you can do all of the above. We have just released a MeetingRoom Lite Confluence plugin that provides an mrjr macro, letting you embed a chat widget anywhere you wish on a page or a blog post.

While not as feature-rich and powerful as its older brother, MeetingRoom (which by the way also provides a Confluence macro), it is extremely simple to use (all parameters are optional) and requires zero configuration.

And best of all - you don't have to pay a penny for it, it is absolutely free.

Happy Customers

2010-09-30T19:45:00.001+01:00

It seems like people from all over the world are interested in MeetingRoom group chat server. Sometimes they come from places where you would never expect to get customers. And they seem to like it a lot.

Yesterday, we received this testimonial from Isra Software & Computer, located in Nablus, Palestine:

Many thanks for you, and your company. We are now enjoying our teams business chat. [...]
Teams communication was one of our major needs

We wish you all the best

So why don't you also become our customer? We still have free MeetingRoom licenses left! Send us an email to apply for a license at mr-freelicense@spartez.com

Need advanced group chat solution? Try MeetingRoom 1.1

2010-09-21T15:02:00.010+01:00

It all started very simple. At Spartez, we wanted to have some means of group communication that would not involve shouting across the room and making an awful lot of noise, which distracted everybody. So we came up with a simple solution - we decided to create a Jabber bot that forwarded mesages sent to it to all other users in its roster.

This was fine for a while and everybody was happy: the noise in the room turned into almost total silence, as everybody was chatting instead of yelling. What's more, people working from home were able to get in touch with their colleagues, which made our office more "virtual", friendly and flexible.

After a while though, people started chatting not only about work, but exchange jokes, talk about what they did on weeked and so on. This started to resemble the original problem - this time in cyberspace instead of in the physical space. So we added another bot, just for "work stuff". Then we got split into multiple projects, so we added a bot per project, so each project team had one. Of course, this meant that we needed to have more powerful user management, and also required some automation to chatroom bot creation.

Then, people wanted to be able to search past conversations, as they contained valuable group knowledge. This required creation of a web front-end and adding a database to store conversations. While we were at it, we added ability to upload and share files. Then people from outside of the office - hell, from half way across the planet - started using the chartooms.

Then, more and more features were added and one day we decided to turn the project into a commercial application.

And so the MeetingRoom chat server was born - it is available for a very reasonable money (starting from $10 for a starter version). It can also be freely evaluated for 30 days from the initial install. And - it is free for open source projects and charity and non-profit organizations.

Some features include:

Integration with any Jabber server - MeetingRoom uses XMPP as transport protocol
drag&drop file upload
chat from any Jabber client or from web interface
advanced chatroom and user management
simplified chatroom creation on a federated Jabber server and on Google Talk server
many commands for enhancing your chatroom conversations
integration with external applications and services, such as

Atlassian JIRA and Confluence
Wikipedia
Google maps
Google translate

Architecture extensible through plugins
Embedding MeetingRoom chatrooms into Atlassian Confluence pages and blog posts, using the meetingroom macro

But wait! There is more.

We have decided to do something a bit crazy.

In order to celebrate the release of
version 1.1 of MeetingRoom,
we have decided to give away free unlimited licenses
to first 100 (that's one hundred) users who ask for them.

In order to apply, shoot us an email at
mr-freelicense@spartez.com

Skitch for Windows? Not really. But let's go further than that.

2010-09-14T21:20:00.010+01:00

Pretty much every Mac fanboy knows and likes Skitch. Me too, although I seldom use Mac.

There is however one major (OK, more than one to be honest ;)) problem with Skitch. It's only for Mac OSX and there is no sight of so desired Windows support. In fact the original blog post at Skitch website (dated March 2008) about it has been mysteriously removed - here is the cached version by Google. Not to mention Linux. Another drawback is that you cannot easily access Skitch from anywhere. You have to install it first. Inconvenient.

ScreenSnipe comes to the rescue.

When I completely switched my development environment to Linux, I missed so much a screenshotting tool which would be as simple and beautiful as Skitch. Gimp made me mad (sure, after years I've finally mastered it, but initially, to draw one stupid arrow and a text, I almost cut myself). Thus I decided to write my own screenshot app. That's how ScreenSnipe was born.

I wanted to go one step further – make it really cross-platform and installation-less. A screenshotting tool for the 21st century and Web 2.0 era.
I think I am getting there. ScreenSnipe is maybe not so snappy (yet) as Skitch, but it has some completely unique features, it evolves quite fast and is really installation-less (directly available from the web browser) for all these 100-million or so PC users who happen to have Java 6 installed on their boxes. It runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (and maybe on other systems which I have not had a chance to test).

A couple of months ago I released a fully integrated ScreenSnipe with Atlassian JIRA – my beloved issue tracker. Last weekend I released something which I desired even more – simple yet powerful and collaborative (editable) screenshots directly in Atlassian Confluence – a wiki (or perhaps I should say a collaboration platform) which I love and use every day.
ScreenSnipe for Confluence makes an annotated screenshot a first class citizen of this enterprise collaboration system. Not only you can easily make screenshot and annotate it in many ways, disguise, emphasise, crop, zoom. You can publish your screenshot with a single click in Confluence page (or blog, or comment) and this picture will be editable (as vector graphics) for every person who can modify attachments of this page. You can easily just replace the underlying screenshot, leaving the annotations intact or just slightly modified to match new graphics.
Think about technical documentation (and pictures often not catching up with the evolving UI), release notes, visual discussions, UI and UX reviews, QA. All of these is now hopefully much simpler and more effective.

ScreenSnipe for Confluence (as well as SS for JIRA) comes with a completely free 30-day trial. Installation on the server side is really simple (just upload a single jar file). No need to do anything on the client side.

Enjoy.

P.S. To celebrate the release, ScreenSnipe for Confluence is currently offered with 20% discount.

Hardware failure can ruin your schedule

2010-08-30T18:30:00.002+01:00

I am not referring to computer hardware this time.

I was driving home from a short weekend excursion when the alternator in my car died, 100 kms from home. 40 kms later the battery was dead, my car pulled up at the side of the road, night falling (not fun when you don't even have the hazard flashers) and I only hoped that the battery in my daughter's DVD player will survive.

Fortunately, my family lives nearby, so we were quickly picked up, stayed for the night and had unplanned one day vacations.
It would be much less fun if it happened somewhere in the middle of Poland, when I was driving back (or towards!) vacations 2 weeks ago. Just calling a towing service is not so obvious option if you travel with a 2-year-old - tow cars are not suited for traveling with small children.

This event gave me a lot of free time to come up with a few thoughts:

It's a bad idea to be the only person responsible for generating invoices etc. If you can't do it automatically, at least make some arrangements so that you are not the only person responsible for it. Having somebody that will cover for you when you ask is not enough - you may be unable to ask. Being indispensible is good when you are an employee, not when you run a business.
Have your iPhone battery charged when you travel - recharge it at every opportunity.
We depend on electrical gadgets too much. Electrical-only lock on the trunk hatch is cool until you need to get to the warning triangle stored in your trunk and you can't because the battery is dead (and so are the warning flashers)
Google is a lot less helpful if you qualify your "auto service nearby" query with "open on Sunday evenings"
I am so used to having all sorts of backups on the Internet (mail, documents, pictures, source code, long term memory) that it gets really frightening when I realize that I cannot restore my car engine from any online backup...
Be always prepared that your trip will last a day or two longer than expected. Having a few extra pieces of clothes is one thing, but taking into account that you might not make it to the office on Monday morning is equally important. And always take your laptop with you no matter what your wife says ;-)

Modern Java like development environment for PHP

2010-08-25T13:00:00.025+01:00

Recently (in June 2010 to be precise) I attended PHP conference in Amsterdam. I just wanted to refresh my PHP knowledge, look around and get some news what is happening in the community before starting new project with the PHP technology. I did not use PHP for last 6 years so that was necessary to discover new solutions, frameworks and trends which appeared during that time. The most important for me were three things: performance, frameworks and tools used to create code and support agile practices like continuous integration and code review. I focused on these things when choosing tutorials and sessions but also when talking to people I met. This time let me share my thoughts and information I got regarding the PHP tools.

Last two years I had pleasure of working with Java and excellent tools created for that technology. IDE is the first to name. I had occasion to work with IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse. IDEA looks not very pretty (it uses SWING in oppose to nice SWT in Eclipse) but as most paid applications is more polished in terms of UX. Nevertheless both of them allow to quickly navigate through the code, go back and forth in the history, switch between files, jump to method callers, superclass or places where class instance is created and what is even more important they allow to fully refactor the code. It is easy to change method name, move the method or class to other place, extract method or variable from the part of the code and much more. After two years spent with such tools it became natural to have all these useful features right under your fingers. This is why the first questions I asked people I met at the conference was "What IDE do you use? Does it support decent refactoring?". I heard several answers for the first question: Eclipse with PDT, PhpED, ZendStudio, Komodo, Netbeans, PHPEdit. Unfortunately the answer for second questions was always "no". I checked briefly all of those IDEs and in fact none of them supports "advanced" refactoring like global move or rename which I use quite often after playing two years with Java. StormPHP from JetBrains (the company behind IntelliJ IDEA) was not mentioned by anyone. It is a quite new product and looks very promising but it is still quite new, lacks some features and is not free (but much cheaper than ZendStudio for example).

The other interesting topic was Continuous Integration. It is almost a standard in Java world but the PHP folks I met there had no experience in that subject at all. I got partial answer attending Sebastian Bergmann tutorial Quality Assurance in PHP Projects. Sebastian advertised Hudson as his favorite Continuous Integration server tied with set of his own tools like PHPUnit, copy/paste detector and dead code detector. He mentioned also Atlassian Bamboo and phpUnderControl. Overall it looked much better than in case of IDE but I promised myself to test at home if any of mentioned tools is really usable in PHP environment.

The next thing was Code Review. Again no one from the folks I met was able to point any tool. Unfortunately there was no session which covered that subject at the conference so I did a research at home. The only thing I found was another presentation by Sebastian Bergmann which you can find here. He mentioned Atlassian Crucible and Review Board there but again without details so like for Continuous Integration I decided to dive into the topic deeper and test the tools.

Interesting thing is that most of the people at the conference were excited about the continuous integration and code review ideas but they did not use them at work. It looks like PHP community is getting more and more excited about agile approach to software development and tries to follow best Java practices and adapt Java tools or develop their own equivalents. Funny thing is that I met a guy who started to learn Java because he wanted to work with modern, agile environment and mature tools.

After the conference, at home I started to build my own PHP development environment to check if that is possible to have it at least half as good as for Java. I chose Eclipse and PDT, Bamboo, Crucible and Atlassian Connector for Eclipse as I used most of them for last two years and I was one of the authors of Atlassian Connector for Eclipse.

Setting up the Eclipse and PDT went smooth. I installed also Atlassian Connector for Eclipse with support for Bamboo, JIRA, Crucible and Subversive.

Bamboo appeared to support PHPUnit so having the build system in place was not a challenge as well. I found some minor issues and even reported them to Bamboo development team. The guys solved the problems in two weeks or so and the fixes are included in the latest Bamboo milestone build. I did not try but it should not be a challenge to have something more than just PHPUnit run for builds. I can imagine copy/paste detector, dead code detector and even syntax checking run at the build time. Thanks to the Atlassian Connector for Eclipse it is easy to see the build status right in your Eclipse where you can also see the build log, label build, add comment, rerun build and see the list of failed unit tests in JUnit format. Rerun the test locally unfortunately does not work as Atlassian Connector for Eclipse supports only JUnit and there is even no available plugin to run PHPUnit tests inside Eclipse and grab results.

Crucible is also very mature tool and I had no issues to install it, configure and use with Subversion and PHP source code. Creating and performing reviews is a pleasure with Crucible. I installed also Fisheye which allows to browse and search the SVN repository in an easy way. It supports also CVS, Perforce and bunch of other providers. The last step was to create and perform reviews inside Eclipse using Atlassian Connector for Eclipse. Creating a review from the piece of code or set of files was easy and worked fine. I faced the first serious problem when I tried to perform review. Atlassian Connector was not able to open PHP files from the review inside the Eclipse as they came from the outside of the workspace. It took me some time to debug the problem. As a result I raised few issues for the PDT, org.eclipse.wst.sse and Connector itself. I fixed them on the Connector side so it is now possible to view PHP review files inside the Eclipse, go through the comments, add new comments and replies and more.

Finally I managed to have all that stuff in place. I was not fully satisfied with the IDE but Continuous Integration and Code Review solutions worked fine. Builds still needed more configuration e.g. create deploy build but that was more scripting than Bamboo related job.

I hope some of the PHP folks will find this post useful and try to set their own modern Java like development environment for PHP projects. Good luck!

Testing a Million Issues JIRA Performance

2010-07-14T21:45:00.005+01:00

A customer was considering buying JIRA to replace their email-based customer support operations (Call Center / Help Desk).
They asked a simple question:

Can JIRA handle a rate of 2000 - 3000 new issues a day, accumulating to over a million issues after a year or two?

Core requirement that gave any chance of success was amount of active users:
- only about 15 people would have access to the system, plus a robot that would receive issues and comments from email queue and send out replies.

You can find the answer and how we have come up with it on our page.

Javarsovia gets really seriously big

2010-06-28T17:27:00.002+01:00

This year I attended for the first time the annual free (!) Java conference organized by couple of great folks from Warsaw. This conference – Javarsovia - more or less doubles (in terms of the number of participants) every year. This year it attracted about 650 people and I bet it could have gathered more, if the organizers had not suggested several days before the conferences on the web page that the registration is closed (and most of folks understood that there is no point in coming, whereas it meant: come at your own risk – there theoretically may be no place for you).

650 people makes Javarsovia one of the biggest Java conferences in Europe. And a lot of big players already noticed that: Google, Adobe, Oracle, Microsoft – all were sponsors this year. Thanks guys.

There were 4 parallel tracks. Each had six 45-minutes-long sessions. Drinks and lunch (very satisfiable) were served too. All free of charge.

So what I saw and learnt there. Honestly not much, but it was my own fault – please read why. But to the point:

First I listened to Jakub Nabrdalik who was talking about bio-degradation of your code. A very good speaker (although he claimed it was his first time – it was really really cool). Many people laughing and enjoying his style proved it. The content was also fine – more targeted toward less experienced programmers (coders). I would call it – line-level (or implementation level) code conservation.

I missed there more high level things like design consideration, architecture, but overall it was time well spent.

Next, I myself talked about agile contracts (basing on several we have had in last 2.5 years – including our wonderful relationship with Atlassian). About 300 people decided to listen to me. Wow! Thank you guys. Unfortunately I sucked. I was talking about how bad we are at estimation and I proved it myself. I overran the session by 8 or 10 minutes and still had several very important things to say. Shame on me.

And I was penalized immediately. Many people chased me down outside the main conference room and I have a prolonged discussion (or Q&A session) which lasted for about 1.5 hour.

Which means I missed the session I really wanted to participate in – Gil Tene talking about concurrent GCs. I almost missed my lunch. This is the price of talking for too long. I also wanted to hear Tomasz Kaczanowski talking about Gradle, but apparently I could not clone myself – it was colliding with my own presentation.

Then I rushed to hear Sławomir Sobótka and his take on Software Craftsmanship and the patterns. Slawek has been recently considered by many guys as one of the best speakers in Polish Java scene, so my appetite was very big. And that's why I felt somewhat disappointed. Slawek's talk was really good and informative, but I felt that he was quite dispirited and did not demonstrate such energy I had hope he would show. He talked about design patterns, how to apply them wisely and how they apply to software professionalism.

It's obvious that Uncle Bob inspires this year a lot of people with his craftsmanship quest. I somewhat predicted it after Devoxx 2009 Uncle's talk (awesome BTW – watch it guys).

My next stop was Tomasz Łabuz talking about AOP, JPA, ThreadLocal – very decent talk, but I did not learn there anything new. Although it was good to hear the first really technical talk with a lot of Java gore.

The last session I attended was the one where Jarosław Pałka talked about NoSQL. Unfortunately it was disappointing for me. I was late 10 minutes or so (talking too long with guys from Javart who happened to use Atlassian products and our Connector). As virtually whole talk I attended was about Neo4J, I initially though I had missed the rest, but then other people complained about it too.

SPOINA.

In the evening there was a free (thank you sponsor again) event where we could eat (traditional Polish fat food), drink (beer of course) and socialize – a lot.

This was probably the best part of the day – I met a few great guys and I could talk to them for hours.

As usually, such events are most for all about socializing, meeting new people, exchanging ideas and inspiring each other.

Javarsovia definitely met its goals then.

See you guys hopefully next year. Maybe till then our Polish railway won't suck any more so much (5.5 hours to get to Warsaw from Gdansk – the distance of 340 km).

But maybe not – as everything in Poland is to be ready only by Euro 2012 ;)