Of Groundswell and Product Owners

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Martin Harris

I have just finished reading Groundswell by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research. The book has been around for awhile but its concepts are worth understanding. Its a great book about how Social Technologies have changed the way companies relate to their customers. Not only that but how companies can benefit from Social Technologies within their own organisation. Its a good read, get hold of a copy. The book is rich with Internet law, marketing tips, research and good practice. It gave me some ideas on how Groundswell could be used to provide a product owner with some powerful tooling.

Groundswell shows a way to tool up your Product Owner?

One of the most important scrum principles is to assign a Product Owner.

Vietnam, man takes a call in the temple.

Tool me up, Temple, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: Martin Harris

This person should have a very good understanding of the business. At first glance is seems like a good idea for that person to be an active part of the business. For a single dealer platform it looks like a good idea to recruit someone who actively deals or for a legal application a senior member of the law staff. The problem with this is a dealer is likely to be too busy looking after money, and the Lawyer is in and out of court. Active members of the business have better things to do, so we have to look elsewhere for our product owners.
read on for the tooled up idea

Gigaspace API design – the GigaSpace write method

Posted on January 11, 2010 by Martin Harris

Now don’t get me wrong, I like gigaspaces and I am not into bashing someones API for the sake of it. Take a look at the GigaSpace interface documented in javadoc: http://www.gigaspaces.com/docs/JavaDoc7.1/org/openspaces/core/GigaSpace.html Its time the API was cleaned up. Take the write method for instance:

<T> LeaseContext<T> write(T entry,
                          long lease,
                          long timeout,
                          int modifiers)
                      throws DataAccessException

These are the things I dislike about it:
Continue reading →

TimeUnit use it more of the Time please!

Posted on January 6, 2010 by Martin Harris

Time for my first blog of the year. Yea! Mind you its a bit small, but then perhaps that is a good thing.

Look at these two setters. Setter methods like the first example are very common. Take a look at the second its so much better. With the second the responsibility to convert is neatly delegated to another class instead of forcing the user of the api to work it out. In addition the programmer can supply hours, minutes or any other that TimeUnit supports.

public void setDuration(long durationInMs) {
    this.duration = durationInMs;
}

public void setDuration(long duration, TimeUnit timeUnit) {
    this.duration = timeUnit.toMillis(duration);
}

TimeUnit was brought to you by: java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit! Its handy, so use it!

JVM Languages

Posted on December 22, 2009 by Martin Harris

I love this page, have a browse around its like going back to university learning many languages in the same day! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages Look at all those wonderful ideas. There are some that most of us would be familiar with others that hark back to a previous era, and yet more that are just pure genius. Personal favorites include Frink which, “represents all numerical quantities as not simply a number, but a number and the units of measurement that quantity represents. What that means is you can convert a value to another unit and track units through calculations easily.

Continue reading →

Transient Technology

Next time you look it might be gone

Author Archives: Martin Harris

Gigaspace API design – the GigaSpace write method

TimeUnit use it more of the Time please!

JVM Languages