erik doernenburg

It has been in the making for some time but now the ThoughtWorks Anthology is available from the Pragmatic Programmers. The Anthology is a collection of essays written by individual authors from ThoughtWorks covering a wide range of topics that we encounter on our projects. My essay finally gets our thinking on Domain Annotations into writing, after we had presented the ideas at a couple of conferences. A more in-depth description of the Anthology can be found on the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Working with CruiseControl I’ve always found CCTray a really useful tool… for Windows. Being a Mac user I decided we really need something like this for the Mac and started working on CCMenu this summer. After a few beta releases this has reached version 1.0 yesterday. Check it out here.

I have looked at applications of visualisations techniques to improve software quality for good while now, and at a QCon conference earlier this year Floyd Marinescu and I chatted about my current thinking. If you are interested, the full interview has been published on InfoQ now. More here.

I’ve just spent an inspiring day at CITCON 2007, an open space conference about continuous integration and testing. Matching the occasion I have released the last (hopefully) beta version of CCMenu, my Mac equivalent of CCTray.

This is a good year for London. First, we saw JAOO come to London, in cooperation with InfoQ, and now we also get a our version of the No Fluff Just Stuff exchange, in cooperation with Skills Matter. I have heard a lot of great things about it and so I am really pleased that I can finally attend. And, before I forget, I will also give my advanced TDD talk. See you there.

The JAOO conference is one of my absolute favourites and this year I have the honour of hosting a track on enterprise application frameworks. As you might know I’m interested in a variety of development platforms and so I’m excited to have talks on Java and .NET frameworks as well as Ruby on Rails in this track. It is also a rare opportunity for me to be able to talk in depth about some of the work I’ve done: Mat Wall from the Guardian and I will present a case study on the development of the new Guardian.co.uk website.

This is Open Source week… I finally managed to get out a new release of OCMock, which brings a couple of contributions and improvements around handling of unexpected invocations. The new ‘nice’ mocks simply ignore these, and the framework now rethrows exceptions in verify. Normally, OCMock follows the fail fast (PDF) philosophy, but some frameworks ignore exceptions when they are thrown, and we still want the test to fail. More details on the OCMock page at Mulle Kybernetik.

In the past couple of months I have spent much less time than normal at our clients and have instead joined the CruiseControl Enterprise team, which is part of ThoughtWorks Studios. The studios are a relatively new division that is building commercial software but in the case of CruiseControl we have made all our changes available to the open source community. And these changes, including the Dashboard, a brand new reporting application, have now been released as part of CruiseControl 2.7.

Just back from this year’s developer summit in Stockholm and despite being caught up in a strike of SAS for the second time in a month I had a fantastic time; and we even got a “superstition rebate”. Read more about that on Beat’s blog.

Travelling’s good for you, and on a recent trip through Patagonia I unexpectedly found the answer to a question that had tormented me for a while: What does SOA really mean? Well, have a look: The meaning of SOA.