At Educating Programmers I talked to several people about Mindstorms. Not LEGO (though there’s a great deal to be said about that too), but the book, published in 1980 by Seymour Papert, in which he sets out a vision of learning inspired by the use of computers. It’s a book which most people present had heard of, of course, but I can’t recall anyone saying they’d actually read it. I encountered it in the mid-1980s, when my children were young, on the back of exploring many different programming languages and coming across Logo. It left a deep impression on me, and I was enthusiastic in talking about it, and lending my copy (too enthusiastic — would the last person I lent it to, please give it back? Thanks).
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Odd how an idea that brews for a while is suddenly thrown into prominence.

With some 30 others I was delighted to be part of the Educating Programmers summit, organised by Jason Gorman and held at Bletchley Park last week. The very next day (it really couldn’t have been timed better) Eric Schmidt, in the McTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Festival, generated significantly more awareness of the woeful state of computing education in this country:

You need to start at the beginning with education. We need to re-ignite children’s passion for science, engineering and maths … I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as standard in UK schools. Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made.

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“You can’t do it like that!”

“Why not?”

“We agreed at the beginning of the release that you would do it like this“

“Ah, but doing it like this makes no sense now.”

“Look, in the meeting minutes. You agreed!”

“So? We’ve learned a lot since then…”

“But you can’t do it like that!”

Bureaucracy hates self-organisation.

Prompted by a brief twitter exchange, it’s worth reminding ourselves what refactoring is.
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As last year, the UK Agile Coaches Gathering was both a great community-builder, and a total ideas-fest. In particular, Tobias Mayer (Presentation is not Facilitation) helped reinforce the poverty of presentation as a training technique, and Petra Skapa’s question about what we can learn from other coaching disciplines elicited some great stories about experiences of coaching and being coached.
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Ever since hearing about the architecture of rapid change and scarce resources I’ve wanted to talk to Maurice Mitchell, one of its leading advocates. I was delighted when he agreed to give an invited talk at SPA2010.
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I’m please to see James Shore’s chapter on No Bugs online. It’s a great explanation of how the XP practices reinforce each other to support the development of excellent code.

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But thankfully found again. Through a series of circumstances too complicated to relate, I’ve recovered (after its perambulations of six years or so) my copy of Michael (A) Jackson’s Software Requirements and Specifications: a lexicon of practice, principles and prejudices. (SRP in what follows)
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On Sunday Gojko Adzik and I joined forces to run an Open Space session at GOOSgaggle on how we might work using TDD to improve our abilities in software design. Three things (after the break) have suggested to me that this might be important –

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At ScanDev 2010 last week, Kent Beck spoke about Software G Forces (slides from an earlier version of this talk are here. Observing that the move in our world is towards more and more frequent releases to users, Kent asked the question — what does this mean for our organisations? (agile in organisations this was the focus of the track - he said he’d tackled the implications for teams and team practices in earlier versions of the talk).

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