People and Technology

I’m not going to explain what workflow is as I’ve probably blogged enough about it already. But the JBoss Workflow (jBPM) guys are coming to Dublin on June 6th. If you’re into workflow (and if you’re doing any sort of software for large business you should be) then this is a do not miss event and we’re privileged to have it in Ireland.

The JBoss workflow guys are dream guests. They just asked for a couple of venue suggestions and they finally went for the Guinness Hopstore where Barcamp ran last year. Next thing we got was an email saying that the JBoss Workflow event was go. So for the benefit of people flying into Dublin, here’s the information we gave on where to stay and things to do if you’re making a weekend of it.

(More information on the event on Tom Baeyens Blog)

How to get there

Dublin is pretty well served by direct flights from Europe and the US. Aer Lingus and Ryanair are the two biggest airlines flying into Dublin - but there are plenty more (list at FlightMapping.com).

Things to do

• Tour of Guinness brewery and visit the Gravity bar (one of the highest in Dublin)
• Dublin Pub Tour and general social scene (it’s a coincidence that the first 2 items are drink related!)
• Tour of Scenic Wicklow Mountains and Glendalough
• Liffey River tour by boat
• Dublin Bus tour - including it’s Georgian buildings and coastline
• Newgrange - 2000 years older than the pyramids, in the stunning Boyne valley
• Windsurfing , Kayaking or Rock climbing in Viking Carlingford Fjord.
• Trinity College Dublin, 400 years old university , right in the city centre including the 1000 year old ‘Book of Kells’
• For the more curious , Belfast is 2hrs away by express train in Northern Ireland.
• Get lost in Phoneix Park, the worlds largest city centre park.

Places to Stay

I don’t tend to say in Dublin hotels too much (!) but the following I know are reasonably good value (and quiet / clean)

• 3 of the Jury’s Inn (Christchurch is just down the road from the event location, but the IFSC and Parnell Street are also good)
• Academy hotel is ok, if slightly more expensive , if you’re stuck.
• If you want an airport location (about 20 mins / 20 Euro Taxi from the city centre) the Premier Inn chain are pretty good.
• Hotel Isaacs is budget but decent , central and near the main bus / train stations.
• Morgan hotel is where the presenters were put up for the Dublin Java conference. Central but Slightly more pricey.

For people from the community, there’s also plenty of ‘budget’ backpacker type accommodation.

JBoss have kindly allowed me to write on their Blog about Drools (although I am still waiting for them to come to their senses). The other guys get to talk about Unifying Rules and Processes and Business Rules WebApps. And I get to talk about pigeons. Yep, Pigeons; birds that fly, sometimes useful for carrying messages and have one hidden talent.

A Random Pigeon Photo
During the cold war, the Soviets (allegedly) trained pigeons to inspect ball-bearings on the production line . The Pigeons would sit in comfortable little boxes while the shiny silver ball bearings steamed past on a conveyor belt. If the pigeon spotted any that were defective, they would peck a button and the broken bearing was gone. Since the fall of the Berlin wall, all the pigeons have been gainfully re-employed over at Google.

Thankfully the pigeons didn’t go to work at a Bank in the City (have you ever seen anything with feathers drive a Ferrari?) . While the pigeons would be very good at responding to simple market events events (Market up , sell; Market Down , Buy). more complex analysis escapes them; For example ; if the market is down for the 30 mins, and Shares in Acme corp are down more than 10% than the average ,and I have seen 3 buy orders for that share in the last 60 seconds = I think the market is about to turn = buy shares in Acme corp.

Never mind pigeons; most humans would find that difficult - think about trying to read the stock ticker prices (the ones you see rolling across the screen at MSNBC) for all stocks, while trying to hold the buy and sell information for the last 30 minutes in your head. And do that not only for one , but for the couple of hundred different types of shares in the market. And while keeping an eye on your own trading position so that you’re not exposed to one sector of the market (e.g. keeping enough cash , not too many property or technology shares. No wonder most traders make their millions and burn out before they’re 30 - that sort of Complex Event Processing (CEP) will wear you out.

Most IT applications are like pigeons; they can only handle simple events. Press Button. Do something.

The way to make millions is to design applications that can handle these complex events, and apply sophisticated business rules to the (evolving) situation. And do it quickly enough (milliseconds) to seize the opportunity before somebody else does. A keep on doing it as long as the market is open.

Funnily enough, Complex Event Processing is part of the vision for Drools. With enough support, I’m sure we could convince the guys to stand up at JavaPolis and use a set of Pigeons on his slides. I suppose it’s better than using pictures of lego people to explain how to do projects using Agile.

I’m dipping in and out of the presentations at the Irish Java Technologies Conference (IJTC Dublin), so I’m not going to get to see the top 10 speakers. I will update this as it goes along, but my notes on the conference so far are ….

• Bernie Goldbach came all the way from Tipp on the off-chance that he would get 3 minutes with Joel Spoelsky. Given that it’s a 4 and half hour round trip, I’m glad that he got his interview.
• Joel, as ever, was a very good speaker. His message for software developers; soft rounded corners matter. Think iPhone instead of Samsung brick.
• David Syer of Interface 21 was talking about what’s next for Spring (2.5 and 3.0). A lot of good stuff coming up; support for the latest Java Enterprise specs, Webflow , OSGi (deploy bundles , not applications), configuration using annotation instead of XML
• Shaun Smith of Oracle. Covering building JPA Applications (Java and Databases) using Eclipse and Java. Now, I’m not a great fan of Toplink (I prefer Hibernate) , but the open source work including the work on the Eclipse IDE , and it’s support of the JPA (Java Persistence Architecture) standard, and it’s ability to transform Java Ojbects into loads of things (e.g. XML instead of Database Tables) is making me want to take a 2nd look.
• Caught talking in the Lobby : Shaun of Oracle Toplink and Emmanuel Bernard of Hibernate. I was vaugely disappointed these two didn’t come to blows (being from rival projects). There were actually nice to each other and exchanged business cards. Fascinating conversation though …
• James Strachan , Iona and Apache, speaking about messaging patterns. He takes the bean soup that is messaging and integrating your applications and makes it seem really simple. He’s also talking about Apache Camel, ActiveMQ and ServiceMix

Other People Blogging about this:

• Luan O’Carroll , who put a lot of work into making the conference happen.
• The O’Reilly GMT announcement of the Irish Java Conference.
• The Aquarium blogging about the conference “around the corner”.
• Web2Ireland.
• Bill de hOra, who has a good blogpost about the conference.

Links to our JBoss jBPM (Workflow/ Business Process Management) presentation slides to follow shortly …

Joel Spolsky is flying in to Dublin next Wednesday to give the keynote speech at the Irish Java Technologies Conference. Mark 7.45pm on Nov 7th in your Diaries folks - Jake has the offical announcement and ask him in person for the full story. In case you don’t know who he is, Joel was one of the early Microsoft employees, one of the first bloggers (since 2000) and is an expert on management and Java software development projects based in New York (possibly due to his stock of stories from Israeli Military Service).

So how did Joel make me a Java Techie? You know Excel, that Spreadsheet thing you use everyday. Part of the reason it’s so flexible is because of Joel’s work back in the early days at Microsoft- he was program manager for the team at that created Excel Macros, which eventually morphed into Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). A long time ago when I was still a business person I got involved in automating manual tasks using these Microsoft Office tools. From there, every job got more and more techie until it reached the stage where I must blog about Java every day. It’s all Joel’s fault.

Tickets at the door cost €245.Booking here costs €189. Joining the DubJug (Dublin Java Users Group) for free before booking gets you a further discount.

After months of intimidation encouragement , Andrew has finally taken to the blogosphere and made his first post.

Do you remember Dustin Hoffman in Rainman? He was an idiot-savant (not the PC Term) that was a genius at Mathematics, but had talent for little else. Too often we’re like that - genius in our own niche (IT, Law, Sales, Marketing, Finance) but useless outside of it.

ShareIT is an attempt to break outside of these niches and share useful knowledge in the small business sector. The slides below are from the first ShareIT event in Cork (held last week), with a follow up event in Dublin (Microsoft Campus) on April 28th.

(Updated with links to the Dublin Event)

What you do if you weren’t doing your current job? While we all harbour dreams of running a magically profitable coffeeshop, working only 3 hours a day, what would you really do if you wanted a change of career?

If I wasn’t in IT , I’d be in Finance, on the basis of …

• My original degree is in Business (with French). Somehow I got seduced into IT (you don’t hear that very often).
• Both Finance and IT require their own set of knowledge and expertise. Once you’ve acquired that expertise, the work can be quite profitable, as not everybody can do it.
• Both are quite strong employment areas within Ireland, with the IFSC being one of the easiest parts of Dublin to get to from Drogheda (think Trains).

Sadly (but very sanely), neither Finance nor IT is considered ’sexy’. There again, you can’t have everything. They’re both quite hard to explain to your Mum - as far as she’s concerned , I work ‘in computers’. This is akin to lumping Salesmen , Mechanics, road sweepers and Michael Schumacher in a category ’something to do with cars’.

However , this lead-in does explain the contents of the ‘what’s Paul Reading?’ list. All links are to Amazon. I’d recommend all the books with the exception of the last one - it was written by a newspaper journalist and the slightly jingoistic style reflects this.

1. Economist : The City - a guide to London’s Global Financial Centre
2. Freakonomics
3. Java security
4. How the City Really works

Most people building systems run into the following problems again and again:

• How to capture Business rules , in a way that both the Business users and the computer can understand.
• How to capture the flow of actions in a system, in a way that both Business users and the computer can understand. This flow is across multiple users, and may extend over days or weeks.
• How to deliver a system to the user (e.g. Via the Web), but to give the user a rich interface , similar to what they are used to on the desktop.
• How to maintain and enhance older systems , now that Java has been mainstream for more than years.
• How to take advantage of the new Features afforded by Java 5 and EJB 3, and what business problems to the solve.
• How to build components for reuse in all environments (Web , Enterprise, Command Line and Desktop).
• How to map information in a Java System to and from a Database (Persistent Storage or Legacy System).
• How to deliver value to the business at every point in the project.
• How to use the many resources and solutions already available in the Java community.

It’s to address problems like these , that I’ve been asked to put together a Advanced Java training. It’s early days yet, but I’d like to get your input as to what you’d like to see on such a course.

Full details of the Advanced Java course are available on the knowledgebase / Wiki. Leave your comments here.

Update: I posted a similar question on the (technical) O’Reilly Books Java blog. If you’re interested in seeing the responses , click here.

The announcement on the official BarCamp Dublin Blog is here.

To quote what is barcamp?

[Barcamp] is an informal gathering of people from technical and business backgrounds, where information and experiences are exchanged. The event is geared towards sharing knowledge and learning from others and there is a policy of encouraging active participation in all discussions.

So if you’ve never been to one before, and not sure about attending. Just Go. You’ll be glad that you did.

Update: Paul asked me to change the order of links so that the ‘official’ site came first (previously I had his blog listed top). The original links are below.

Paul Walsh has announced the date of Barcamp Dublin on his Blog. It’s Saturday 21st April in the Digital Hub Dublin. Paul is organising the Event , along with EllyBabes and Joe Drumgoole.

Update 2: I’d forgotten to mention Keith Bohanna’s post about the upcoming Barcamps. Anybody else up for organising a Barcamp north of Dublin (in Drogheda, Dundalk or Newry)?

A good friend of mine needs an Enterprise Java Developer, to be based in Dublin Ireland (sorry , no Teleworking). It’s a contract position and the project is high profile and sounds quite interesting. The main reason I’m passing on it as the exact location is the only place where I cannot get to easily from Drogheda! One man’s poison is another man’s meat (or something like that).

With that information (i.e. next to none at all) I’m going to ask you if you’re interested. Yes , I could put all the buzzwords (the usual Spring , Ajax, JSF, EJB , Hibernate), but to be honest I don’t know where the technology road will take this project.

One small catch. We need to weed out all the muppets that are out there. So, you need to have been blogging about Java for the last couple of months. If you’re interested , leave a comment and I’ll pass on your details.

Dear Bruce,

First up, thanks for the book. Yes I’m saying thank-you about 8 years too late. ‘Thinking in Java‘ is what got me going in the language and in my mind is one of the best Java books written (sorry Tim). Giving it away free only cemented your reputation as the Bono of the Java world. OK, Bono without the Guitar, the Stetson and with a couple of overloaded constructors thrown in, but a man of stature nonetheless.

Secondly, I’ll forgive your flirtations with Python, on the basis that I’ve been having an affair myself with JRuby. I now understand the pain that you’ve been having at home, the endless repetitive arguments to get simple things done, and the temptation of a newer, younger, more flexible model.

So , I think you’re onto something here in your blogpost. I can feel the pain, the need to deliver Rich clients to users over the web. I think that Ruby / Google Web Toolkit / Struts 2 / Name your web toolkit has further to go than you may think , but eventually these ‘heroic efforts‘ (nice quote) will run out of steam. On the basis of your recommendation alone I’m willing to look at Adobe Flex, but I’m not sure if this is going to solve all the problems.

Now , a lot of us Java guys don’t like change (and as if you needed proof, just look at the comments on this O’Reilly blogpost on the Google API’s). All the same , we have a problem that gets worse every passing year. 6 Years ago we could have been sure that 90% of web sites were running Internet Explorer 4. Now we’ve got IE, Firefox, Safari (in all their different versions) as well as an explosion of mobile devices. The Windows Vista launch is only going to fragment things further with yet another platform to support.

No one web solution is going to display the same in all of these browsers. We’re not going to get a single solution from Microsoft / Sun / Adobe that everybody from developer to my Granny is going to install. So we’re going to have to take the ‘least bad’ route - something that looks great, but degrades gracefully to standard HTML on less capable devices. Excuse my ignorance, but I don’t know (yet) if Flex does this.

Yes Hybridizing open source Java is the starting point for the solution. Unfortunately we’ve a long way to go yet, and Flex is perhaps only inspiration along the way.

Yours sincerely

Paul

RTE, The Idiot, Infactah, and Eirjobs are writing that Motorola all to cut it’s software jobs in Cork.

First of all, I’ve been in this sort of ‘waiting for the axe to fall‘ situation and it’s not nice. It’s not nice losing your job, and it’s not nice having to wait 6 months or so until the plant actually shuts down. It’s not nice wondering where the next mortgage payment is coming from.

In my case I was working for Dell in Dublin , when they decided to move their entire Public Sector Sales organisation to the UK (made commercial sense, couldn’t argue with the decision). The worst part was dragging yourself in to work to face your colleagues in an atmosphere of gloom - and this was when everyone was promised (and got) internal transfers.

The Irish Indo (Registration required) is reporting that this will send ‘shockwaves through the Irish software Industry‘. It’s big news , but we’ve been here before and we will be here again. Motorola axed most of it’s radio division in Swords in the late 90’s. Logica (also in the mobile Telecoms area) once employed close to 1000 in the IFSC in Dublin, but are now down to (barely) double digits.

Some anecdoes about the upside of both these major layoffs :

• A large part of the Motorola management Team ended up working in Navan for Case (the big red tractors). While tractors may not be as sexy as phones (leave a comment if you disagree), they were a key part in getting a new Startup into the area.
• Most of the Logica people found jobs , after a difficult interim period (this was the dot com crash after all). There now exists a ‘Logica Mafia’ that useful to tap into if want to connect to anybody in the Telecoms - Software development world.

The other interesting thing was the number of people who found jobs outside of the ‘traditional software industries. One team of ten people, had only 2 that were in software development 5 years later. The rest used their redundancy cheque to train as teachers, start their own business , travel to Australia and New Zealand …

Not a nice place to be lads. But it will get better.

Recently one or two people disagreed with what I had to say about the impact that the Google, Amazon (and other) API’s will have on Java. Considering the ratio of positive to negative comments (about 3 for and 30 violently against), I obviously need to express myself in a clearer way. The link to the original post is at the end of this article, read on before you consider flaming me.

So , deep breath , here goes.

Compare the the way you develop now , with the way you built software 10 years ago. Do you remember having to manage your own memory? Or the pain of trying to deploy your software on different machines without a JVM? Or the hassle of trying to write distributed software using Corba? Or using a text editor instead of the fine IDE’s (Eclipse, Netbeans or JDeveloper - take your choice) that we have today? Would you consider building your software without a tool like Ant or Maven?

(Shudder). Things have moved on ,and I am very glad they have. Likewise, the way we develop 10 years into the future will be very different. I don’t know what the future will look like, but here’s a simple guess.

The biggest trend today is the move from software running on your computer , to software being delivered over the web. I’m not talking about the buzzwords being thrown about regarding ‘Service Orientated Architecture’ or ‘Enterprise Service Bus’. I’m talking about simple API’s that are available for use over the web today. Like the API’s and products from Google - including their Documents and Spreadsheets, and their Authentication service.

‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler’ - Albert Einstein

‘You Ain’t Gonna Need it’ - Anon, XP Mantra

As a good Agile Developer you’d probably agree with these quotes. But what if the most simple way of doing things was not to develop in Java at all? Most people don’t build their own operating system - they use Linux, Windows or OS X instead. Most people don’t write their own Java Server - they use Tomcat, JBoss or your server of choice. The pattern is the same. A small, dedicated core of developers builds the product, and the rest of us say ‘thank you very much’ and use it to get things done.

This range of ‘off the shelf’ solutions is increasing all the time , even before the online services arrived on the scene. As a Java developer , you’ve said ‘thank you’ , downloaded the latest version and integrated it into your solution. The time you save means you deliver other cool features instead. Java is very good at this ‘download and integrate’ process - not only is it a key benefit of Object Orientated Software, but Java has the widest range of solutions available (if you don’t believe me , just check out Sourceforge).

Java can also let us build our solutions (either partly or fully) around the online API’s. Java has great networking and XML handling ability already. In time this will become as normal as the idea of using a JVM. Great - we use these API’s pretty much like we do libraries today, and we can continue developing pretty much as before, right?

Wrong.

Remember, what is the most simple way of doing things? What if the most simple way of doing things was not to use Java but to use a more simple language (like Ruby or PHP) instead? Until now there were a couple of advantages that Java had over these ’simple’ (and that’s a compliment) languages. When using online API’s these advantages disappear, or worse, become a liability.

• Scalability and Robustness. Enterprise Java is massively scalable (it’s one of the reasons for it’s complexity). But can even you outscale Google?
• Security. Enterprises haven’t (yet) learned to trust the security of online applications. This trust will be hard earned over time. But already you can make the argument that you data is safer with Google / Amazon / other service provider than on your average virus-ridden home PC.
• Language Ties. To use the Java libraries you needed a JVM somewhere in your solution. Once you had a JVM , you might as well write your own solution in Java. But when the product you are extending is hosted elsewhere, you are free to code in the (most simple) language of your choice.
• Always on. As long as you have a connection to the web, your programs can use the API’s. Scripting languages like Ruby and Python can claim to be even more portable. Not only can they run natively in most environments, they can also be deployed via a JVM if that is your choice (under the guise of JRuby and Jython)
• Features. Need a feature that you don’t have in your scripting language? Just borrow it from Java by running in the JVM. How can Java win a ‘features arms race’ against that?

So do we face a form of developer apartheid, where a ‘hard core’ of Java Experts develop web API’s that the rest of us use via scripts? Let me know what you think. Like the original blogpost said, it may not be the end of Java, but perhaps the end of Java as we know it.

There are times when Web2, blogging , feedback from readers and the wisdom of crowds is great. And there are times that it’s extremely painful.

Like this Blogpost I wrote over on the O’Reilly site. Do Google Spreadsheets mean the end of Java?

I expected some people to disagree with me , but at least disagree for good reasons. The key point, that Web 2, it’s applications (of which Google spreadsheets is only ) and their API’s will fundamentally change the way we solve business problems using IT has been lost in the knee-jerk reaction.
Copy of the blog post here.

Seems that both Michele and Tom will be at the Irish Blog Awards (but not the Barcamp in Waterford this Saturday). Tom’s not happy with his hosting. Make that Tom is very unhappy with the hosting. Will it all end in a barroom brawl in the basement of the Alexendar hotel?
My own opinion is that all hosting contracts, like politics, end in tears. I’ve sympathy with Tom , having recently been in a similar situation. In my case , I have nobody to blame but myself:

• I should have backed up my files if they were that important to me.
• You get what you pay for. In my case , I was on shared hosting for next to nothing. I was unhappy , but not surprised when it fell over.

Overall , I can understand , but I’m slightly disappointed with Tom. He’s the closest thing we have to an ‘A-List blogger’. With that power comes responsibility - I wouldn’t diss a companies hard-won reputation (even though they may deserve it) without thinking over ‘what could I have done better’)
Note, I don’t host with Blackknight and have no connection to them.

Or to be more accurate ‘Google Spreadsheets mean the end of Java as we know it’.

Think about this. Who pays your wages Mr Java-Developer-who-has-just-had-a-couple-of-years-at-the-top-of-the-pile? Clients, or if you’re in a larger organisation , the business folks (i.e.’internal’ clients). Do you think any of them care about Java? Do any of them know what Java is? All they want is to get things done, quickly , and with as few mistakes as possible.

These business people would be happy to run their organisations on Spreadsheets. Do you remember the cartoon where Dilbert convinced the pointy haired boss that he could fly the plane using Excel? There’s more than a element of truth to this. I know of at least one US Fortune 100 company that (until recently) conducted most of it’s operations on little more than Microsoft Office and duct-tape. It worked, not very well, but it worked.

Until now , the next line would be ‘Excel (or any other type of Spreadsheet) is not secure / scalable / sharable / not web friendly’. That was until Google launched their Docs and Speadsheets. It’s an online version of Office with some spreadsheet functionality. Play with it a bit and you’ll see that there’s plenty missing. But this being Google , I’m willing to put good money on

• (a) new features rolled out (think steamroller) and
• (b) These Spreadsheets being massivly scalable / secure / sharable.

This being Google, there is also an API (developer page here). It’s got massive holes in it (e.g. you can’t yet use it to create a new spreadsheet). But when Microsoft bring out their version of online spreadsheets (and they will) not only will they clone the Google API (to get market share), they’ll need to go one further and introduce new features / remove the usage restrictions in order to compete.

So, secure, scalable, sharble online spreadsheets are here to stay. So lets take a look at Mr. (or Ms.) Pointy haired boss thinking about their new project:

1. Hmm, I think we need to be able to gather which health plans our employees are enrolled in.
2. OK, I’ll throw together a spreadsheet to show people what I want
3. Before I’ll give to our friendly Java developer and let him ‘do’ a website from it.
   Soon I’ll just share this on Google.
4. Great , Loads of people are now using it, I’ll just the (Ruby / PHP / Insert other language here) guy to add one or two extra features.
5. Most Excellent. Why don’t we spin this off as a Web 2 company and sell it to EBay??

There you have it, Massively scalable , Highly secure websites (see Google Authentication API), without needing to know anything about EJB, JMX , JBoss, JDBC or any of the hard won knowledge that us Enterprise Java Developers have built up over the last 7-8 years. I’m exaggerating, but not much.

What do you think? Is Enterprise Java dead, or is Web 2 just another boost and a slightly different way of doing things for us Java people?

Other Java Posts from Technology in Plain English

Some other notes:

• Java is read once , run almost anywhere. The ‘Almost’ is because (for various technical reasons) the difficulty in getting reasonably priced web hosting. Have your tried getting some recently - impossible to find , or at least impossible to find at the prices PHP and Ruby guys can get theirs?
• Tim O’Reilly with was right with the notion of Web 2.0 and the network as a computer. We’ve also written about the notion of online software being at a tipping point.

This article was originally published on the O’Reilly books OnJava Website.

It didn’t go down too well when an elderly relative asked me over Christmas ‘what exactly do you do?’. After fobbing him off with the usual ’something in computers’, he was shocked to find out that I spend most of my time ‘Grabbing people’s brains and shoving them into a PC’.

This kind of blog-related-violence is normally associated with Twenty-Major (Warning , Parential Guidance required , unless you’re over 80), so before you call the police , let me explain.

Look at your hands. Unless they’re scarred and calloused (from the weekend’s DIY) the chances are that you work in the knowledge economy. You could work for a Bank , Insurance company, Legal company or be a medical professional but most of your work consists of one thing:  You push pieces of paper around that have some magical value.
Or you would push pieces of paper around if it hadn’t all been computerised in the last 10 years. Now you swap files and emails to get things done.  And you swear on a regular basis when the computer can’t find the information you’re looking for, or someone doesn’t understand the email you sent them. But the important bit, the information processing,  still remains in your brain.

Which brings us to Red-Piranha (site update in progress) and the shoving of people’s brains into a computer. While we can copy an MP3 music file (with Adam’s and Bono’s imagination in it) and send it around the world, but we can’t photocopy your brain. We don’t want all of it, just the part that gets the magical value-added work done. The bits about drinking beer and playing volleyball on the beach we’ll quite happily leave with you.

So this is what Enterprise Web 2.0 is all about : getting the computer to take a load off your brain so that you’ll have more time to spend on the beach drinking beer. Chapter 3 (draft) of our Enerprise Web book has just been put online, which shows you exactly how to do this.

I don’t normally post as the result of a mass email, but this is one of the more useful ones.

Ken of Calmar has just sent out information on Irish Consultants .ie - it does exactly what it says on the tin.

It’s not just for Information Technology Consultants (where yours truly lives), but the site also covers:

• Advertising & Media
• Archaeological
• Design
• Environmental
• Financial
• General Management
• Health & Safety
• Human Resources
• Information Technology
• Legal
• Marketing
• Property Management
• Public Relations
• Research & Development
• Risk Management
• State & Semi State Agencies
• Training & Development

Basic listing is free, although a ‘premium’ listing costs around 300 Euro. That sounds a very ‘Web 2′ business model , even if the site (thankfully) doesn’t use those words!

… have a read of this instead. Ireland is probably unique in having , within the last 10 years , benefited hugely from offshoring (why do you think all the US Companies are here?), then benefited again from being about to offshore work itself.

Thanks to Bill for the link.

I’ve written and presented quite a bit about Agile Project management, but I’ve to recognize that these guys are experts. This PDF is a 90 Page guide to Scrum and XP Project Management, written in a way that both Business and Technical people can understand.

[Link to crisp OO and Java consultants]
It’s clear , it’s honest , and more importantly , it’s not trying to sell you anything (Rational consultants, you know who you are). Ok, they’re not trying to sell you anything , not unless you’re in the market for a bit of OO consultancy in Sweden.