The OOPSLA 2007 podcasts have been available for quite a while, now. If you are interested in software engineering make sure to have a listen. I especially enjoyed Frederik Brooks talk on "Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design".

Get it here.

Some months ago, I posted a link to a podcast from a presentation by Ben Saunders. He is one of those crazy guys who likes to blog from the North Pole. However there is now a new TEDTalk with him which I can truly recommend.


This time you can actually see some images and videos from his expeditions so give it go.

I am a perfectionist when it comes to software development. When I started designing software I always thought I had to get everything right directly from the beginning. This led to long and boring UML sessions which were useless anyway (the only constant is change).

In 2004 my professor introduced me to XP and TDD. Both greatly reduced my pain. Suddenly I do not have to think about every tiny detail upfront because I can change nearly anything later without causing great costs.

In 2005 I discovered that this was not completely true. As every application developer I was heavily working with databases and soon discovered that my code was agile but not the database. Fortunately smart software engineers like Scott Ambler and Pramodkumar J. Sadalage felt the same pain and invented ways to address the problem. They recently published a book called "Refactoring Databases" which is laying on my table but I still have to find the time for reading it.

Now, what is left? As I found out yesterday the next hot topic seems to be web services. How can a provider of services stay agile without causing problems on the consumer side? Fortunately again some smart people are already working on this issue. Read this interesting article from Ian Robinson and Martin Fowler. There is a podcast with both of them, too.

Ben Saunders is one of these guys who like to go skiing in the Arctic. He already did some really impressive stuff including a solo expedition to the North Pole. The cool thing is that on this trip he was constantly blogging using custom software and a satellite phone. Ben also sent the first live video ever from the North Pole.

At the moment he is in Greenland testing new equipment and so far it is really interesting to follow his "daily-routine". Btw ITConversations has a podcast with Ben where he talks about his expeditions and what motivates him to do this kind of stuff. Highly enjoyable.

My professor at my former university always told me this great stories about Smalltalk programming and how cool it is. Last month in my software engineering course we got the assignment to convert a Java program to another OO language. Of course, I chose Smalltalk and my professor was right. Smalltalk is a really great language and after diving into Ruby and Smalltalk I just cannot see Java code anymore. It is so damn ugly.

If somebody is interested in learning Smalltalk check out this article from Ron Jeffries.

Oh and if you want to build a fancy webapp with Smalltalk check out the Seaside framework. After hearing a podcast with the creator Avi Bryant I took a quick look at it and was really impressed. Dabble DB uses Seaside and after seeing their demo movie I must admit that you can build really impressive applications with it. There is a nice beginner tutorial here.