2012 is coming to its end and it is time for reflections and outlooks.

Øredev was held for the 8^th time, and it has been developed year by year. There is a big team behind the conference where of a couple of persons work all year round. During the spring we gather a program committee that will spend 800 hours to create the program each. During the autumn lots of technical and administrational work is done. During the conference we engage dozens of volunteers and technical staff. We are very thankful for everyone creating this wonderful conference in November each year.

During the years we have seen, created and followed trends within software development. Øredev was an early adopter of agile methodologies. New technologies as Cloud and NOSQL were immediately present when they came. This is thanks to the program committee spending 800 hours each year to create a program for you delight.

A trend we have seen and adapted to be closer to the user of the products we create. The web and UX tracks have been added to the Øredev family recently and 2011 we had the theme Enter Userverse to embrace this shift. This year the web track was one of the most popular.

Let us see what 2013 will bring us. The next Øredev 2013 program committee starts their work in February. In March the call for papers is open. And in June we will release the program for Øredev 2013, which will be held in Malmö on November 4-8. 

Our excellent photographer has taken more pictures than usual at Øredev 2012. We are publishing all pictures on our Facebook pages. 

Pictures from our poplar quiz night with prod winners are already up.

All videos from 2012 are now uploaded. You can find them here. 

At Øredev 2012 we had the possibility to upload most videos. The last couple of weeks we uploaded the remaining videos. There are four, out of 128 sessions that we wont be able to publish of various reasons. All keynote sessions are available. 

Dave Prior, project manager and speaker who has visited Øredev several times, interviewed program comittee members Jakob and Sigge about the conference. The interview is published in Dave's podcast on Projects At Work. Listen to it to find out more about the sweet spots of Øredev, tips for this year conference and what is so special about Øredev.

When inviting more than hundred speakers to a conference it is inevitable with last minute changes. As every year we are facing a couple of cancellations. All so far are handled with replacements. Changes are announced at the conference through info screens, and before the conference at our blog.
 
We are glad to announce new speaker Kevin Lynagh who will talk about building visual data-driven interfaces with Clojure script. He replaces Noah Zoschke.
 
We are also announcing a second new speaker Hardy Ferentschik, from RedHat, who will give a session about Maven vs Gradle.
 
Last week we shared the sad news about late Ola Hyltén, who passed away in an accident. Catherine Powell will give an additional talk at the conference to cover Hyltén’s speaker slot. Catherine’s second talk is about API usability.
 
Damien Edwards replaces Rob Connery, both from Microsoft.

You'll find totally 157 titles over five days at Øredev. Together with our eminent Program Committee we have organized this vast amount of content through tags. Talking to our Program Committee members asking them for their personal highlights, here are some of the inside information we'd like to share with you today:

Lets start with the words from Mattias Severson and Pär Sikö who co-operated upon the Java content, what are they most excited about...

Mattias Severson starts by talking about Frank Kim. "Frank Kim was recommended early in the program work by a colleague of mine, this because he did a really good presentation about Java Web Security at JavaOne last year. It turned out to be a really good recommendation, because shortly thereafter, Frank was awarded a JavaOne Rockstar for that session."

Mattias continues by saying: "I've been working close together with Pär Sikö (another JavaOne Rockstar), and his experience from other conferences has been invaluable. Pär has repeatedly come up with names of speakers to invite and topics that should be added."

When Pär Sikö picks out two speakers at Øredev he is very excited about, these are who he highlights: "Koshuke Kawagushi is a very well known name in our community and when I sent the invitation letter to him I could never dream of him accepting it." And he continues: "Jonas Birgersson is a person that has the same kind of "reality distortion" field that Steve Jobs had. He is a guy with an incredible story that is both exciting and fun."

Pär Sikö who is an internationally well-renowned speaker continues by telling us a little aneqdote: "A thing that comes to my mind was an Øredev conference several years ago when I was working for another company. My partner and I, Martin Gunnarsson (who is also on this year's Program Committee), were invited to do a lighting-talk one of the days. The talk went well and we were really exited and happy afterwards. What makes me smile, when I think about it, is that it was our first presentation ever. But not the last. So in a sense our speaking careers started at Øredev :-) "

Continuing the chatting with our Program Committee, through this year's tagged program, let's talk to Jakob Klamra. Jakob has been sharing the responsibility for Agile together with Sigurdur Birgisson. Jakobs recommendations are the following:

        Jim McCarthy - a true rebel that does things differently. A visionary that is defining culture hacking, something that is the next step beyond agile.
        
        Maarten Volders - I was lucky to meet Maarten when he visited Malmö a few years ago. He is a great innovation games coach with a new view on things. He is building the agile leadership community in the Netherlands and Belgium, and has organized his own conference around the topic

Sigge (Sigurdur) who also created the test program emphasizes some of the speakers he truly doesn't want to miss:

        Lisa Crispin is co-author of the book Agile Testing, and this is still very much a hot topic since there are so many testers, people and organizations struggling with it now when they "went agile". There are many answers to the struggles, and Lisa will explain in detail about the whole team approach for quality and how to achieve it.

Goranka Bjedov from Facebook will talk about how to look at testing from other perspectives. How will we test in the future and to what d egree should we value good test efforts?

Let's talk to Jenny Håkansson who has been working wi th the mobile content. Jenny recommends Patrick Dubroy. "I invited him because he was on the Android Team and did a really good session at Google I/O last year. However, it turned out he now works in the Chrome team and feels mo re passionate about that so he is going to speak on Chrome." Jenny continues talking about Mikhail Naganov. "I wanted to find someone to speak about Chrome on Android, since HTML5 and web development for mobile phones are modern topics. I asked a friend of mine at Google who said that if anyone is going to speak about that - it is Mikhail."

Sharing the responsibility upon .Net and UX Ola Karlsson and Rikard Ottosson are very excited about this year's program, explaining it to us.

Ola’s personal favorite is the Windows phone app developer Gergely Orosz. Gergely. "I invited Gergely after having heard an interview with him, where he talked about the work and thought which goes into the apps he builds. His views about creating intuitive and stunning applications which stand out in the marketplace even if there are already numerous similar applications, really resonated with me. And I think more people need to hear it!"  

Rikard elaborates his answer: "C# is a language invented at Microsoft to ship with the .NET framework and has been the "mostly imperative" language of choice for the professional .NET developer ever since. One of the top people who oversees C# (and helped introduce such cool features as LINQ and Async) is Mads Torgersen. Yes, having him at Øredev is très cool! Microsoft has struggled with its image of being anti-OSS, because, well, they have not been successful in interacting with the open source community. One of the people battling this image- and actual problem is Glenn Block, who has been active in the Alt .NET community and worked with ASP.NET WebApi, an attempt from Microsoft to do ReST properly, so much so that it isn't even part of WCF anymore, as well as hosting node.js apps in the MS PaaS-offering Azure. In terms of non-softies I would like to mention Oren Eini and Sebastien Lambla who are extremely skilled, extremely charismatic and are not afraid of having strong, well-grounded opinions and sharing them, to the detriment of those who are wrong."

We hope our coming attendees are as excited about this year's schedule as our Program Committee is. The conference team behind the conference would also like to take the opportunity to thank the Program Committee for their absolutely wonderful work with this year's program. Thank you all!

Ola Hyltén tragically passed away a few days ago in an accident. Ola was scheduled to speak at Øredev, our conference that he has visited many times before.

The best words written about Ola Hyltén in authored by Pradeep Soundararajan. Please read them here. 

It is of course a great loss for the conference. The loss is far much greater for his family. Our thoughts are with them. 

At Øredev there is high quality coffee available. Øredev interviewed Mattias Sjöbäck who started Sandby Kafferosteri. Mattias has installed a coffee shop in the middle of the conference. 

In this interview with Mattias, you will experience a passionate barrista and coffee maker who knows most aspects of brewing a cup of Java.  

Ø. It is clear that you are passionate about coffee, was there an "a-ha" moment when you realized that you wanted devote your career to the coffee bean?

The first time I made a really great espresso I knew “this is what I want do for the rest of my life”. Today my main interest isn't competing in different coffee championships with making the best espresso in the world (I do that anyways ^^) - the main goal is rather to give the big crowd a new flavor experience combined with making life better for farmers and their staff, with a fair trade perspective on all I do. 

Ø. Knowing that it is more than just the taste of coffee for you, but also the journey "from seed to cup". You have travelled all over the world visiting coffee plantations. What is the criteria and standard necessary for a plantation to provide you with stock?

Quality off course but also that the farm takes a functional social responsibility: schools for the children, well paid staff, healthcare, food, clothes, clean water and so on. Also I prefer to buy coffee from farms that have nature and eco- friendly ways to grow the coffee or at least have a plan for how to get eco friendly in the future. 

Ø. Tell us what prompted you to launch Sandby Coffee? And which roasts you specialize in? Describe the core values of your business. 

The main reason I launched Sandby Kafferosteri is that after working with specialty coffee for about 12 years I noticed that we (the specialty coffee community) had forgot the "big mass" off people drinking coffee. I’m talking about the regular coffee consumer that buys their coffee at the supermarket and brew at home and also coffee at offices. This kind of customer stands for more then 95% of the coffee consumers and they will never (or seldom) go to a specialty coffee shop to buy fully traceable, high quality coffee. During all these years I heard a lot of specialty coffee roasters saying "we have to penetrate the big crowd to get them to buy better coffee in terms of quality, fairness and taste. That way we can work for a sustainable trade with the farmers in a better way". And after that they said: "We don't want to sell our coffee at the supermarkets or to the vending machine at the offices, this kind of product can only be sold at special coffee shops with educated staff". My thought after hearing that for so many years is that you can't make a change for the better in a big way (in terms of quality, taste and fair coffee) if we don't sell the coffee at the locations where the costumers are used to buy the coffee today. It became too "nerdy" and a part of the specialty coffee industry sat on "too high horses" in my opinion. Off course, my coffee is still sold mainly at the specialty coffee shops, but we are working with several projects and sell the coffee at a few supermarkets and offices and here is where we will develop in a big way in the future. To make the life better for millions of coffee workers we have to sell more specialty coffee to new customers. That way we can pay the farmers more money for their hard work and a result of that will be better coffee. The nerds are already buying their coffee from "hipster shops" - its time to really get down to work to make a difference and get the big crowd to buy good sustainable coffee. In short terms, witch is the "underline" of Sandby Kafferosteri: BETTER COFFEE TO MORE PEOPLE! 

 Ø. What kind of coffee can we expect at this year's Øredev?

You will drink several different coffees, brewed both as espresso and filter coffee. One of the filter-brewed coffees will have a lot of flavor of fruits and sweetness and the other will be more chocolate like. The Øredev attendees will drink two different espresso coffees as well. One will be my version of Italian espresso and the other will be a “sweeeeet” surprise! 

 Ø. Will coffee be available for purchase at the conference? If yes, which varieties will be available?

Yes, we will sell two different espresso blends and several brew blends and/or single estate coffee (single estate = not blended coffee, all coffee in the bag will be from one farm).

Ø. Like produce, fruits and vegetables, is there a coffee for every season? Do you go for a lighter variety in the summer and something more robust in the winter?

I like to drink all kinds of coffee all year around. The occasion is of more value to me in my decision - like wine, if you eat a steak perhaps you want to have a robust wine but if you drink wine straight up perhaps you go for a lighter one.

 Ø. During your very popular coffee tasting at Øredev 2010, you mentioned there are way more flavor notes in coffee than there are in wine. How many are there, and what are the most dominant ones? 

There are about 800-900 flavors in coffee (wine 400-500 I think). 

All coffee has a taste of bitterness but apart from that coffee taste very different depending of what verity it is, how its roasted, what kind of drying process used at the drying mill, at what sea level its grown, what kind of fertilizer used, climate and a lot more! "Bad coffee" has fewer notes of sweet, nice flavors and more taste of bitterness, burned, sour and taste often filthy (and they are!).

  Ø. You explained once that coffee makes you tired for 20 minutes before it perks you up. If correct, why is this? What other secrecies of coffee can you share with us today?

It takes about 20 minutes for the body to get the caffeine in the system. However, if you drink an espresso the strong flavor can give you a boost directly. In terms of how much caffeine there is in coffee there are more of it in filter brewed coffee than espresso. This because of the longer the water have contact with the ground coffee the more caffeine will have the time to get extracted: Espresso is still stronger then filter coffee in terms of flavor but the filter coffee will have more caffeine in it. 

Ø. How do they get the caffeine out of coffee? And does it really get all of it out? 

There are several different ways to get the caffeine out of the coffee but it also affects the flavor (in a bad way). To name two: One way is to get it out with carbonate under high pressure and another is Swiss water decaffeination where the coffee goes through several baths. But as I am a flavor freak and want the most of my coffee I rather drink water or a soda if I don't want caffeine in my body. If you have to change the nature of a drinkable or eatable product to suite you, perhaps you should consume something else. Off course all people think different about this but I see it this way: If I’m allergic to dogs I don't buy a dog and eat allergy pills all day...I buy a turtle instead.    

Ø. Looks like you have a thing for cigars too from what I find on the information superhighway, yes? If yes, how did that come about? A visit to Cuba for some special beans? 

One of my customers is a very well known cigar enthusiast. I roast coffee for his company ("Kind Cigars") and he made an own label to his coffee called "Kind Coffee". He talked me in to try one cigar out and I found a lot of nice flavors in it apart from the tobacco. I only smoke perhaps two cigars per month because it affects my flavor palette when cupping coffee. I am against smoking 100% because of the health issues, but after reading a lot about cigars I came to the conclusion that cigars is actually OK if you don't over consume them. In good cigars you have only tobacco and no chemicals what so ever. 

Ø. What is "cupping" and why is it called that? 

Cupping is when we try coffee out. Like wine tasters in the coffee business we have our own ritual when trying coffee. It’s done with a spoon in a special cupping-cup. The cupping ritual is done the same way all over the world. 

Ø. Can we expect any special etching art for Øredev 2012?

I haven't been working with my latte art for a long time so the first day we will perhaps do more classic patterns. After the first 500 cups I think we can try etching on demand ^^.

Ø. Which method creates the best cup of coffee in your opinion? Filter, press etc… 

Every method has its charm and I use almost all of them. The methods I actually don't want to do are where we get sediment in the cup because that gives a false mouth feel. French press is one of them and I don't use it at all. Sometimes I feel like an espresso and sometimes I care for coffee brewed in a porcelain filter. You can get great coffee from most brewing methods as long as you use really good coffee and don't over (or under-) dose. Also the water temperature and the quality of the water is crucial. 

Ø. It has been said that coffee can help one focus. If you agree, do you know why this is true?

I agree. I focus better if I have a nice flavor in my mouth. If you drink good coffee the flavors will last long after you ended your cup. Also the caffeine helps you being alert off course. 

Looking forward to seeing you and serving you all during Øredev2012!

We are happy that Steve Jennings will be this year’s host. Steve once described himself as a Muggle in the great Banquet hall of Hogwarts – this is how he feels when he enters the world of software developers. He sees all the magical energy he is surrounded by. He noticeably isn’t a SW guy himself – and still he has created some amazing tools for developers and designers to help each other and interact. With Higomo you can unlock the value of what you do, know, and have.  It is a true implementation of social currency.

Steve has a background from professional cycling. Then he moved on to business, started a nutrition company and later he moved on to one of the biggest food brands in the world. He decided to change lanes and literary make the world a better place, thus he co-founded GoodCred in Malmö. Higomo is their first release.

When Steve choses to do something – he does it. He is one of the most dedicated and energetic persons you can find. Some people call him an alchemist – this might just be true.

The numbers of tools are endless, how many of them have you used? We have chosen some for your delight.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the developer behind Jenkins, and Hudson. He will discuss continuous integration techniques with Jenkins. Both as a full day master class (tutorial) and session.

Structure 101 will also be presented in both formats: a deep dive master class and a session. Chris Chedgey is the designer of Structure 101 and Restructure 101. His co-presenter is Rachel Laycock.

Then you can learn more about Git, VIM, REST, and of course several NOSQL tools.

A year ago Java 7 was launched and now we see Java 8 in the horizon. We will skip the past and cover the present and the future. From Java 8 Joel Borggrén-Franck will talk about Lambdas, which will be the biggest new feature. He will show you the need for Lamdas, the feature itself and its effects.

 
Then Marcus Lagergren will present Nashorn. Nashorn is the new primary JavaScript engine for the JVM targeted to be released as part of Java 8. It has been developed from scratch and compared to the existing Rhino engine it is smaller and yet it is significantly faster.

Then Dalibor Topic will serve you the Directors cut of JDK 7 Updates Project in OpenJDK. You will learn how it works, and how to work within it, how to track changes, get your fixes in and more.

Have you ever been worried about cross site scripting, SQL injections and other security vulnerabilities of your app?
JavaOne RockStar awarded Frank Kim will come to Øredev and present "Java Web Security by Example".

The Excellence track from previous years of Øredev is still there with a new Tag -We name it Mastery. This tag includes both excellent programming practices and mastery of software development.

Here you find master Fred George who has written code in 44 years in over 70 languages who will speak about Programmer Anarchy. Also master Brian Foote have a career of four decades to lean upon in his talks. Brian will speak about architecture, where the Why Mud Still Rules talk of course is a sequel upon the “Big Ball of Mud” design school.

Then you have young Master Katrina Owen who speaks about refactoring in a therapeutic way. And not the least Master rebel Zed A. Shaw who bring up the question why Programming Languages are Hard to Teach.

And if this is not enough. We have master classes Monday and Tuesday with several of our speakers, and an extra class with Rob Sabourin on Wednesday. These are named tutorials – just to mix up the nomenclature a bit more.

Many have wondered why there is a gap in the schedule at 2 PM on Thursday, November 8th. This year we'll give you 15 talks in 50 minutes. Choose a theme, enjoy, relax and get amazed, or perhaps enlightened, or even shocked.

Topics are among, NOSQL, Test, Mobile, Touch or No touch. Speakers are announced upcoming week on the web. Some are revealed here.

    •    Oren Eini, Alistair Jones and Chris Harris are all happy colleagues and competitors that together will show us the easiness of NOSQL.

    •    Ola Wassvik and Andreas Olsson from Flatfrog are showing off their amazing multi touch technology.

    •    Robert Gavelin from Tobii technology, presents their vision controlled devices.

    •    Hampus Jakobsson gets into Customer facing iterative development & innovation.

    •    Sebastian Ganslandt will serve us CQRS and event sourcing from the trenches.

    •    Janne Räsänen will bring up HTML5 mobile app development.

    •    Zed A. Shaw bill bring something unexpected.

The sessions are served in pieces of three. They have about fifteen minutes each including interaction with you. Don't miss out!

Web and Frontend, are topics many developers are facing today, as is UX. We present you several speakers upon these topics.

Denise Jacobs from ThoughtWorks will take you from the shallow to the deep waters of CSS, making it scalable and modular. Denise has an impressive background in this, being an author, speaker and much appreciated web design consultant.

If you choose Billy Hollis, you can either have it all, or just a small bite. On Monday, November 5th, Billy gives a full day tutorial upon the subject “Creating user experiences – an entry point for developers”. Or, you can wait until Thursday and listen to Billy's session on “Interaction and Navigation patterns for modern user experience".

Totally we present 30+ sessions at Øredev tagged with Web, UX or Frontend. We're safe to say there is a lot for the developer to choose from at this year's conference.

2011 Øredev sent up a rocket in space. 2012 Øredev continues by launching a satellite.

Hojun Song describes himself as an artist and engineer, and he truly is both. Only an artist can think of an open source satellite initiative. And only an engineer can pull it through and make it all happen. Or perhaps, is it the opposite? This will be up to you to decide. Hojun closes the 2012 Øredev developer’s conference with his remarkable journey on building, launching and shooting out a satellite - into universe, all for the sake of love and peace, and to be the greatest man alive.

Hojun Song comes from South Korea and has a background as an engineer in electrical and computer science in combination with a career as a professional “ski-bum”. After breaking all his legs Hojun finally decided to make the world a better place. Since 2005 he has exhibited his art in Africa, Asia, North America, South America and Europe, and he has worked with large brands as Nike and Motorola. Though, all this will be history when the world will experience OSSI, Hojun’s ‘Open Source Satellite Initiative’, funded by t-shirts.

We are happy to announce that Ole Qvist-Sørensen will hold a session at Øredev. Ole is a promoter of visual thinking, graphic facilitator and holds a black belt in explaining complex things.

Here is a recent presentation by Ole at TEDx Copenhagen, challenging us to draw more, together. 

Together with his colleauges Ole did graphic facilitation at TEDx Copenhagen, and here is the result in the form of a speeddrawing presenting the whole line of speakers

At Øredev Ole will explain why getting getting everyone on the same page matters. In a hands on double session he will show us how to communicate, visually. Think you can not draw? Ole will prove you wrong!

My name is Sigge and I am a Test consultant at Jayway. As a tester, I always try to have a holistic view and open mind about the software project at hand, and always try to apply the best possible approaches and tools to gather information needed to satisfy for good testing.

I really like the diversity in my role as tester. One minute I can be questioning some business requirement from the end user’s perspective towards the business people that know best, while the next minute consists of debugging some sql statement together with a developer to fine tune performance. Whatever the situation, I always try to figure out the most efficient way of solving the problems.

While my scope in testing is broad, I value the context-driven approaches to testing, using the most appropriate tools in any setting. On the other hand, the testing context of the agile project, including automation and sapient testing in a combined symbiosis, is something that I really like to explore.

To help your team deliver valuable software for the users, these will be two of the areas covered in the program of this year’s conference.

Sigge short interview

Sigge, tell us about the sessions you find the most relevant for Øredev 2012.

Lisa Crispin is co-author of the book Agile Testing, and this is still very much a hot topic since there are so many testers, people and organisations struggling with it now that they "went agile". There are many answers to the struggles, and Lisa will explain in detail about the whole team approach for quality and how to achieve it.

Goranka Bjedov from Facebook will talk about how to look at testing from other perspectives. How will we test in the future and to what degree should we value good test efforts?

How was it to be part of the program committee?

Being in the program committee is a valuable privilege. I get to invite and have one on one conversations with the most reknowed people within my very speciality in the software industry. It gives incredible possibilities to learn much more rapidly when my own ideas can get directed towards the very smart people that I meet in the role as a program committee member.

What are the sessions you plan on attending this year?

I need to say that I will attend the Test workshops on Monday. They are both highly relevant for me that works as the tester in agile teams. We have Lisa Crispin about the actually quite hard to achieve test automation to work in the agile team. Some teams make it work, but the vast majority never get there. Pradeep Soundararajan will describe Session Based Test Management with the visualization of mindmaps. I am very interested in doing this, since my own mindmaps tend to get stuck. I want them to be more fluid and more of a help when reporting. I think Pradeep will delve very deep into that and much more. Maybe you will convince your first top management about a bug with a mindmap next time.  =)

Tell us a memorable moment that has occurred during your time as a committee member.

Last year I and Mattias performed a students drinking song at the speakers dinner. It was alot of fun to sing a Swedish drinking song in front of all those bright software professionals.

You have probably already browsed the Program on our web and through the scheduler. Unfortunately we have some limitations in the scheduler, which we have to bridge with better communication. This is it!
 
As an addition to the Program on Wednesday November 7, we have a workshop with Robert Sabourin, Just-In-Time testing. It is a renowned workshop that RobSab delivers all over the world, and we are very proud to be announcing it at Øredev. See more information about it here

If you want to attend this workshop, we need you to register for it separately by sending an email to test-ws@oredev.org. There is no extra charge for attending, but a limited number of seats because of the workshop format. We apply the “First come first serve” rule.

The namedropping continues. Goranka Bjedov combines these worlds into several exciting sessions at Øredev. Experienced from AT&T, Google and Facebook she is known for her technical achievements and her refreshing humor. Goranka will tell us about the Future of Testing and Performance and Capacity in a Cloud. These are questions much too universal to be tagged only as Test, it includes DevOps, Cloud, Architecture and BackEnd as well.

This is a promising combination from Goranka who before entering the industry was associate Professor in the School of engineering at Purdue University. She is an experienced speaker and has authored many papers, and two textbooks.

On Monday November 5, Goranka is giving a full day workshop where you can learn and apply it all. “Performance in a Large Scale Cloud”.

Read more about Goranka Bjedov and her sessions

Øredev presents you a rebel that has changed more than one industry. Many of us know him as the artist, the songwriter and millions are still listening to his music, daily. Alexander Bard has a daytime job too.

He works for Handelshögskolan (School of Economics) in Stockholm and is one of the world’s first internet social theorists and is an international thought leader in this field.  Alexander has written several books in “The Futurica Trilogy” (with co-author Jonas Söderqvist) and he advises multinational companies as well as governments in internet related questions.

Alexander Bard will ask us the question “What if the Internet is something much bigger than we think?”

In this speech he will elaborate on the fact that out of all the codes and other digital information we stuff our machines with, something much more profound, something sentient, is emerging. The internet controls us, and possesses our imagination and worldview, rather than the other way round.

Alexander Bard delivers the Thursday evening keynote at Øredev

On October 1, 2012 Microsoft launched a new programming language called TypeScript. 

This language is a strict superset of Javascript that solves a very specific problem – adding object oriented idioms and modules which in the creators claim will help JavaScript development to scale. 

Mads Torgersen and Anders Hejlsberg are two of the brains behind this development and we are lucky to announce that Mads Torgersen will speak about this at Øredev on November 8.

Developing large application systems in JavaScript is hard. TypeScript is a typed superset that compiles to plain JavaScript. TypeScript is browser independent; support any host and any OS. And it is open source under the Apache license.

 TypeScript is to JavaScript what C++ is to C, as in you are free to do whatever you want using the dynamic constructs available in JavaScript, but if you want a shorthand to implement classes and inheritance and leverage the benefits of static typing in terms of tooling and also preview features in ECMAScript 6, TypeScript is for you. Tooling support exists in Sublime, Emacs, VIM, and of course, Visual Studio.

Read more about the session and more about TypeScript here

If you and others from your organization have already registered for Øredev 2012, you are all in for a treat.

This year’s opening speaker is well-renowned editor and speaker David Rowan. David will be discussing insights gained throughout his career as the editor of UK edition of WIRED magazine, meeting and interviewing many of those who have shaped the world we live in today.

David Rowan will point out rebels who shaped our community and make a forecast of the rebels of the future. He’s talk is called “Software won - so what now?” Here is an excerpt:

Software is eating the world. You are the emperors and are cutting through and reinventing industries one by one. Let's think what comes next. What should your minds and skills be focused on now - in order to solve bigger, more meaningful problems that beset us? How can you lead the world into an era of abundance, of iterative trouble-shooting, of optimal management of our resources - in order to generate the greatest happiness for the greatest number? 

David Rowan also writes the monthly “Digital Life” column in GQ magazine, and the “Tech Traveller” column in Condé Nast Traveller, in which he documents his encounters with the innovative people he meets at events such as TEDGlobal, DLD, Stream and Google Zeitgeist.

We are very happy to announce David Rowan as the opening Keynote of Øredev 2012.

What do you do to:

• Understand customer needs
• Deliver the right features
• Make better strategy decisions

Have you ever played games at work? It is fun and actually helps you surpass the way of traditional thinking. It might sound weird – it isn’t! This is what the Innovation Games course during Øredev is designed for.

Several organizations have shown the way of gaming collaboration. Innovation Games is used by many of the worlds largest companies.  Maarten Volders will teach you how to tackle the challenge of developing customer understanding. He will do this by providing you with a fresh perspective on how to use a variety of games with your customers to develop the understanding that forms the foundation of innovation. If you use them, you’ll come to understand what your customers really want. And, you will have fun whilst doing it!

Register for Øredev!

Why don’t you try out the Job or Joy game right now

Read more about how to play this game here. Objective: Get to know your colleagues while making work more enjoyable. How to Play: Drag icons to the chart to show what activities you like/dislike during and outside of work. Happy faces represent things you enjoy while frown daces symbolize what you don't like to do.

Behind the scenes with the Program Committee- Pär Sikö

We will be featuring program committee (link: http://oredev.org/2012/about-us) member insights on Øredev in upcoming newsletter editions. For it is their curiosity and thirst for increased knowledge that is the inspiration for session subjects and speaker invitations. Several of them shared their thoughts on the content and the Øredev experience. First up is Pär Sikö, who chimes on  a couple of the speakers and sessions he's responsible for and looking foward to.

An accomplished speaker himself, he and fellow committee member Martin Gunnarson, have co-presented at conferences around the world. In fact, the first time they graced the stage together was at Øredev when they were asked to do a lightning talk. Both surprised and delighted with this debut experience, this talk would turn out to be the first of many.
With a multifaceted point of view of Øredev, being on the committee provided Pär with the opportunity to influence the overall schedule, something he has been interested in doing for a long time. 

Speakers?

"Koshuke Kawagushi is a very well known name in our community and when I sent the invitation letter to him I could never dream of him accepting it.

Jonas Birgersson is a person that has the same kind of "reality distortion" field that Steve Jobs had. He's a guy with an incredible story that is both exiting and fun."

Sessions?"

I will definitely attend the Jenkins, Structure101 and UX sessions."

Thanks Pär. You and Martin have earned your handmade cookies.

Jim McCarthy will be presenting the keynote "Culture Hacking and the coming era of Magnificence" on Wednesday evening of the conference. 

We asked him to elaborate on culture hacking and he and his wife Michele, (and colleague) were kind enough to oblige. You can find out much more about the McCarthys at their website http://www.mccarthyshow.com/

Culture Hacking: The Magnificent Destiny of Software and the People Who Use It
By Jim and Michele McCarthy

1
The era of designed culture begins now. 
What is a culture?
A culture both describes and shapes a group. It is made up of a set of elements:  shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices.  And more.  Any group who lives according to a unique set of these elements has a culture. Corporations, civic groups, and even families have their own cultures.
There are millions, maybe billions, of cultures.
How do things stand with cultures now?
Cultures are something you more or less inherit.  You walk into them and take your best guess about how they work. There is no way to opt in or out.
Cultures are made up of a jumble of attitudes and practices along with a concoction of rules, mores, and taboos. Typically, none of it is written down. There are no references, guides, or even explicit rules for the cultures in which you live. At the extremes, there may be laws, or formal corporate policies. Someone might help you. Otherwise, you are on your own. It’s anybody’s game.
Whether or not a given culture is comfortable to live in, productive for the people who work in it, or helpful or rewarding in any way for anyone at all is pretty much an accident of fate.
 
2
In 1996, we began experimenting with team cultures in a way that would change things. 
To address the specific problem of self-destructive behaviors within teams in corporations, we created and repeated an experiment. Our experiment requires that a group of people do the following over a period of four or five days:
Form an aligned teamCreate a state of shared visionDesign, implement and deliver a great product.In this environment, we found we could rapidly develop and deploy new cultural elements as they were discovered and/or created. Every innovation was repeatedly tested by many teams in different situations.
We have been iterating the same experiment for the last 16 years.

3
We assessed  the results of the ongoing experiments in two ways. We looked for correlations between experimental elements and the state of that team’s end product.We examined the effects of cultural elements on individual team members:what they felt was their most significant learning or collaborative experiencetheir immediate sense of personal gainwhether or not any gains persisted into their post-experiment life.Using these rough measures, we determined which innovations were most effective and which could be discarded.  The new knowledge from each experiment was recorded and passed on to succeeding teams as their starting point.
We continued to experiment in our own teamwork laboratory. We also began trying out the most successful practices in everyday corporate settings. As it turns out, we were also unconsciously inventing the process of incrementally creating cultures.
 

As agile development and all it’s methodologies are becoming buzz words in the industry, everyone’s eager to claim being part of the movement. One common mistake is to focus in on what each individual can do to change. While improving individual performance is of course important, for agile development, the old adage “A chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link” continues to hold its strength. It is team performance that is essential, and where the big improvements and greater success are to be found. As a team, we are able to achieve so much more than we can as single individuals. As longtime supporters of all things concerning “Individuals and Interactions”, we are featuring an entire day at Øredev, dedicated to presenting a handbook for launching successful agile teams. Attendees will gain knowledge of not only how to start an agile team and get it up and running, but also how to accelerate and continuously improve. The aim is to provide you with the tools to create small miracles.The day starts with Diana Larsen telling us how to achieve lift-off for the agile team to get it up and running. Next, Catherine Powell will explore varying agile team structures with real world examples of what makes agile teams perform well. After lunch, Karl Scotland will present kanban thinking, with tools to measure and improve your team. Jim McCarthy will introduce us to the core protocols: a set of rules that makes cooperation effective and smooth. Finally we invite you to a deluxe double session on Dialogue sheets with Allan Kelly. This workshop will give you hands on experience with this effective tool created specifically for facilitator free workshops, to be implemented in your team. Join us for a whole day of fun, that by day’s end will arm you with a sleek selection of tools you can start employing right away. And- did we mention you will get your own dialogue sheet to take home? Good times are in store! Come and discover just how powerful teamwork is with Øredev! //Jakob Klamra

At Øredev 2011, Alexis Ohanian gave the kick off keynote.  Well known and respected for his activism in protecting the freedom of the information superhighway, Alexis has been crowned "Mayor of the Internet" by Forbes Magazine. He is publishing a book, "Without Your Permission- How the 21st Century will be made not managed" -for release in the Fall of 2013. And more recently, President Obama found time to stop by and and answer questions on reddit, co-founded by Ohanian in 2005. We say 'Kudos Alexis!' You can see his keynote h ere.  A growing host of other excellent video selections from the Øredev library are available as well. All downloadable and sharable. Follow Alexis at @alexisohanian and learn more by visiting his site alexisohanian.com

Hosting such an illustrious and rising star gives us a happy feeling and a terrific souvenir. What kind of souvenirs will we create this year to look back on in the next? That's always an exciting facet of constructing an annual event. You get one chance to perform, and without a doubt, everyone contributes and magic moments are spontaneously styled, to be carried away in our collective hearts and hard drives . We will be featuring different contributors to the conference in upcoming newsletters. If there is something or someone you would like highlighted, please contact kathy.compton@oredev.org. Visit our speaker list, http://oredev.org/2012/speakers for a kickstart on ideas. As we said, we love to give back. And to look back. But the absolute best is looking ahead!

In the developer community we are used to tinkering with technology to adopt it to our needs. All those hours we spend configuring our environments and forking software from github to make it do that very specific thing that only we need it to do. What if we were to apply the same thinking, and spend the same effort on tinkering with how we interact with one another? There is a way to do this, and it is called Culture Hacking. 

In Culture Hacking, culture takes on the form of software. There are surprisingly number of similarities: 

• Changeable architecture 
• Scalability
• Portability
• Usability
• ...and many more.

Culture hackers will try new things to create a new and improved environment for themselves and their team. Agile, and all its subdomains, is a form of culture hacking, but the art of hacking goes beyond methodologies. It is not about “Should we use Kanban or Scrum?”. It is about using all the tools available to improve the environment we work and live in. Being true to the hacker ethos is about experimenting, playing and trying new things outside our comfort zone. As with software hacking, you can not always be sure about what consequences a change will bring. Try something new and see what happens. One can always roll back if the change does not improve the environment. Failing is safe and the goal is to explore.

Anybody can learn Culture Hacking and many are already doing it without putting a label on what they do. Many of the world’s great leaders can be called culture hackers, as they try to change how we see the world, and how we interact with each other.

The important thing with Culture Hacking is that the culture must be designed and implemented. There should be a set of protocols that implements the culture. Without implementation and design, there is nothing to hack.

At Øredev 2012, Jim McCarthy will tell us how Culture Hacking is the path to magnificence. Join us to learn more about this important discipline of engineering, the art of Culture Hacking. 

/JK

We are very much looking forward to 2012 keynote, Reginald Braithwaite, deliver on The Thursday of the conference, with his talk entitled  “The Rebellion Imperative”, introducing three essential tactics when disrupting entrenched institutions.
 
Recently Reginald published a candid piece “What I’ve learned about learning”, containing observations on his learning process. Reading it may very well stir up one’s owns thoughts on the journey towards acquiring new knowledge. Check it out below.

Follow him @raganwald and find out more about this interested and interesting Øredev contributer on his website- http://braythwayt.com/ 

What I've Learned About Learning

I have a rather glaring life-long weakness, a behaviour that has tripped me up many times. You would think that I would have noticed it and corrected my behaviour in my teens or twenties, but no, it has persisted. While I am much better at correcting myself, it is extremely persistent and requires constant vigilance to suppress. Read more...

http://raganwald.posterous.com/what-ive-learned-about-learning

For the past 3 years, Øredev has featured sessions based on REST. Now, moving forward and more in step with what Javaheads have known for a while, it's about going back to basics, building Hypermedia systems as nature intended. At Øredev 2012 we will be featuring 2 sessions given by Steve Klabnik and Glenn Block on this topic of growing importance. Because devices varying from cheap phones to the kindle, from tablets to tvs, are just going to keep multiplying like bunny rabbits. And as the desktop experience is slowly disappearing, we need to be thoughtful towards building a solid architecture on web technology and thus performing as good as possible on each platform.

Friend of Øredev and .NET and web developer, Gustaf Nilsson Kotte, recently published an interesting and thought provoking article on Combining HTML Hypermedia APIs and Adaptive Web Design.

Read Gustaf's article here.....

Poll Results- Hardcore technical vs. Process and tools 

We recently started adding polls to our newsletter, and this is the result of the first: Soft vs. Hard sessions. The _hard_ sessions are the deep technical ones, whilst the _soft_ aka "process & tools" or, more agile-ly inclined are correctly referred to as "individuals & interactions". Whatever you like to refer to them as, each category compliments the other. Øredev strives to bring you the most relevant and high quality content available, but in addition, we also pay attention to the weight distribution of both. If you have something you would like to add to the discussion, comment below.

Knowledge through numbers:

Technical. I'm into the hardcore sessions 33%

Indifferent. I look at each session individually based on quality and personal level of interest. 24%

Both. They compliment one another of course! 23%

Process and Tools. The way things are done is essential to my work 17%

We know that many attendees get the chance to come to Øredev because their companies pay for it. Below, we make it easy for you to outline why attending #oredev2012 benefits not only you, but your company as well. Our post-conference survey last year indicates the percentage of attendees who agreed with these preliminary statements, noted before each reason. We love a good percentage. If you still require a little extra ammunition to get the boss to give the OK, check out the many blogs out there that review previous Øredevs. //KC

93% Your company benefits because attending Øredev fills you with new ideas to share with your colleagues. Ideas which add value to your organization. 

90% Øredev addresses the latest technologies out there. And that helps put you and your company ahead of your competitors. 

88% Attending Øredev helps you find renewed enthusiasm for your work. Enthusiastic employees do superior work and lift a company up.

Fact! Attending Øredev is a power packed education. Knowledge IS power. If you're in the knowledge racket, Øredev is a ball you want to hit. (No question posed in survey. Øredev is unequivocally an educational event above all else.)

53% It is a great place to meet new people and strengthen you and your company's network. Including new customers. This number falls short of the others, which is why we are working on improving ease of connectivity with fellow attendees by offering to make your Twitter handle public and in other ways. 

2012 speaker Chris Richardson, who will be presenting the session "Developing polyglot applications on Cloud Foundry" discusses low cost internet options for travelers from overseas visiting the conference. This may be most helpful to us Americans, but others may also find it useful. If you know of any tips for plugging in to the information superhighway, feel free to comment below.  Click here to read Chris's insights. //KC

There are yearly events that maintain the same graphic profiling from year to year.  Like a canvas strapped to the back of the frogger popping across the creek. Then there are events that switch it up with every turning of the annual clock-o. . Create and Destroy. Create. In case you've ever wondered how Øredev's graphics got that way, we thought it might be of interest to show you the evolution of a visual. 

First comes the Theme contenders.  Some suggestions were Big Data and Mastery. <Rebellion> triumphs. Creative conference manager, Emily Holweck, then takes her magic-est marker and paper and starts to doodle. (She's ALWAYS doodling) 

This is what her imagination and sharpie record on the paper:

I see champagne and a phallic mushroom. and a piece of cheese. Emily gives this doodle to the design team. She describes what she wants, what the doodle <means> and what she wants to communicate through the visual. She tells the doodle's story. Design team takes the story, adds the colour and comes up with this:

Vive le rebellion. People talk about how they feel when they look at it. I felt like i wanted to give the li'l guys on the bottom some vitamin D and book them 30 minutes at the tanning salon. All the reactions are collected, Emily and the designer collaborate and more doodles happen, like this one:

Now there's a star, the li'l guys remain, the tag line gets more space time. It's crazy arrow time! It goes back into the magic pot and comes out like this and 20, 000 copies are printed:

Crazy propellerhead guy and crazy grafitti font. Was Banksy here? Some things remain. Some things go unchanged: Turning Torso, a reliable friend no matter what the weather. It makes me think of the permanently capsized boat as one crosses the Öressund Bridge. I always think "Why won't that boat just sink already?" (But that's a lie, because I always hope it's there.. Please don't die boat! Please don't die!)

/Kathy Compton

Sometimes you can just tell by looking at someone that they are living a fulfilling life, copiously punctuated with happy moments and discoveries. Long time friend of Øredev, Corey Haines, seems to embody this type of soul. 2012 will see Corey at the conference presenting 2 sessions, one on Professionalism in our work, the second on TDD and Javascript. Below is an interview with Corey by Jakob Klamra who is on the 2012 Program Committe. This interview lends a spot of illumination onto the inner architecture of this smiling human being...../Kathy Compton

Interview with Corey Haines

After 12 years of coding for money, Corey Haines decided to leave everything behind. He went on a long pair-programming tour. Corey travelled around the world, pairing for room and board. The mission was to cross pollinate between developers, learn their ideas, and pass them on to the next team. This has lead Corey to help developers improve their fundamental software design skills. He also co-created and led the popularization of the Coderetreat format - a way for developers to get together and learn from each other. One of Corey's latest projects has been to help organize programs and events to teach kids programming and get them excited about tinkering with their computer.

A few years back you lost your job and you went on a long trip, coding for room and board. What made you leave everything and just go?

One of my close friends and mentors, Joe Rainsberger and I, had talked about how great it would be if we could just travel and code with people. I had two things keeping me from doings this: a girlfriend and a job. In 2008 I lost both so it was the perfect time. To begin with I wanted to travel for about three weeks and it turned into nine, ten months. I would be switching from learning from somebody to teaching what I had just learned to the next people like a cross pollinating bee. There was an amazing amount of interaction. People started realizing the effects of changing environments and not just staying with the same people.

Were people acceptable of your idea and the things you were teaching?

Absolutely! It was a self-selecting group of people. If you are bringing some guy in to let him sleep on your couch and teach you coding, you are probably more open to new ideas. I was not there to convince or evangelize. I was there to work with them, share what I knew and try to pick up what they knew.

You have been a forerunner for the craftsmanship movement. What is it that makes programming a craft and what makes a developer a craftsman?

I am not a big fan of the term "craftsman". I like to say that there are two ways to be a craftsman: call yourself one or work for a company that calls you a craftsman. What I like is the craftsmanship, the care and respect that you give for what is admittedly a very difficult creative activity. It is to show respect for the reason you are coding, which is to provide value to the people who are paying you. If your customer needs something that is very quick and a throwaway prototype, provide it like that. If they need something that is long-lived, then you need to build something that can change with your customer's requirements. It is about understanding what value you are providing using the tools and the techniques suitable for that.

How would you recommend people to get into the craftsmanship mindset?

It is about taking a step back from the act of doing it for the sake of doing it and looking critically at everything that you do. Ask yourself: can I link my work to the result? Take automated testing as an example. Why do you write automated tests? I write tests because I have worked in places where we had to go through a slow manual process every time we wanted to release a new feature. This took a lot of time. Automated tests allowed us to release quickly and with that the ability to move quickly. When we were able to move quickly we could change the business quickly. We did not do automated tests because they are glorious in themselves. If you do not understand why you are doing this, you should find people who do and learn from them. I think that is a great first step.

Can you see a difference in the code written by somebody with a craftsmanship mindset?

Absolutely. One of the key things is understanding that change happens at specific points in your system. We want to isolate those points from the rest of the system so that we quickly can introduce a change to that key logic. On the other hand, for code not built with this mindset you can see key logic thrown out throughout the system, which makes change a hard task. I find code that is built to support change focuses a lot on abstraction.

Lately you have done a lot of work teaching coding to kids. How do you teach kids something that is so complicated that very few grown-ups will learn?

I have done a little bit. There are a couple of people out there who have been doing a tremendous amount of work, Steve Klabnik and Ron Evans amongst others. What I have been doing is bringing many of the people from industry and academia together. They have slightly different techniques but share the same goal. We have disjointed programs to teach kids, we should support each other instead. Academia is detached from the industry and do not understand the way we do things. At the same time, we do not understand academia. If we can bring them together that is a great step forward. I use Scratch when I teach and I really love it. It is a programming language created at the MIT. When you program it is like building Lego. You use different building blocks that you can configure and put together graphically.

What was the kids reaction to your programming class?

They really got into it. They loved it and by using Scratch we were able to build Pong in an hour. Scratch takes away much of the frustration that comes with learning programming, like syntax. Scratch is written in Squeak so, you can make adjustments while the program is running, which is much more like the way the world works. Rather than writing a bunch of cryptic commands and then see if they work, it is all about tinkering. There is no way you can explain to kids that their program will not work because they forgot a semi-colon. After the first class several students went home and downloaded Scratch to their machines. The Scratch website is basically like GitHub before GitHub was there. It is very social and collaborative. You can download somebody else's Scratch program, change it and upload it to your account. A wonderful collaborative thing.

Do you think kids starting to learn programming now will be better coders once they grow up?

I think there will be two kinds of people in the world: those who can work with computers and those who can use computers. There is a difference between people who can use only Word, and those who are not afraid to write a macro. I believe that basic computer programming is going to be a core component of literacy in the future.

So it is not about making kids better coders but making them effective people.

It's cool when people review your work. (Even when it's bad but the criiticism is solid.) Especially when you spend 51 weeks of the year in order to show off for one. You want to make sure that that every detail has been considered for that one week. Tester Zeger Van Hese (Belgium) does a in depth write up on his frst Øredev in 2011. Thank you for sharing Zeger! /Kathy Compton

 Apparently he had a good time-

....."it turned out to be quite a memorable experience"........

......."Cosy, laid back and open-minded. Geeky too, in a good way:"......

........"took the stage for some Beer-Driven Exploratory Presenting."

Read the complete entry by Zeger here