In November I sat with Carl Franklin and explored some code to help you get started with Kinect development. Carl has broadcast this on DNRTV.
You can view it here http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=208
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Talk on Seamless computing
This video was taken recently at a talk I gave, at a WiseTech Forum, on how we can build futuristic technologies today.
Friday, November 04, 2011
Creating Seamless Experiences, MSDN UK
I met with the MSDN UK team recently to discuss the work we have been doing to create seamless computing experiences. Sara Allison has posted on the UK MSDN team blog about some of the topics we discussed.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukmsdn/archive/2011/11/03/creating-seamless-experiences.aspx
This is the original video that has triggered this conversation.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukmsdn/archive/2011/11/03/creating-seamless-experiences.aspx
This is the original video that has triggered this conversation.
Seamless Computing, bring the future to life.
I am heading back to Sydney in a few days and some friends at WiseTech have asked me to come and spend an hour at UTS talking about Seamless Computing scenarios.
the details can be found here http://www.wisetechglobal.com/events.html
Hope to see you there.
In this session Dr. Neil Roodyn (http://www.roodyn.com) will discuss how scenarios, that a few years ago would have been science fiction, are now becoming achievable with the technology we use every day. Taking some small leaps and pulling together technology from different platforms, enables us and our clients to now achieve tasks that would have seemed to be magical a mere 5 years ago.
In this session you will learn how some key technologies are likely to become the core components of experiences that seamlessly connect devices, people and software together.
the details can be found here http://www.wisetechglobal.com/events.html
Hope to see you there.
In this session Dr. Neil Roodyn (http://www.roodyn.com) will discuss how scenarios, that a few years ago would have been science fiction, are now becoming achievable with the technology we use every day. Taking some small leaps and pulling together technology from different platforms, enables us and our clients to now achieve tasks that would have seemed to be magical a mere 5 years ago.
In this session you will learn how some key technologies are likely to become the core components of experiences that seamlessly connect devices, people and software together.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Hardly any agile left in Agile
This is something has been nagging at my mind in the last couple of years. When I started getting interested in eXtreme Programming in 1998 it represented a step up from some of things I was already doing with software development teams. We were using techniques best classified as Rapid Application Development. First eXtreme Programming and then the Agile manifesto represented lightweight methods to get software shipped.
There are two important parts of that last statement:
1. lightweight methods
2. software shipped
The concept of doing the simplest thing to achieve a goal, is an important part of eXtreme Programming. Traveling light (or not carrying baggage from previous experiences) is an important part of being agile. One of the aspects of agile that I always found attractive was the objective of enabling the development team to deal with change in short time frames.
While it may not be fully apparent, from the behaviour of many software development teams, the objective of developing software is to ship a product, a finished piece of working software. This desire to find better ways to get software shipped is clearly not something everyone in the industry shares. that is why we have collections of rules that appear to do nothing than keep people in jobs. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that in certain situations we need 5 people analyzing the business rules in order to determine how to build software that manages a complex business process. The reality I often see is that the business process is not that complex and the reason the team has 5 business analysts is because the career path for developers in that company is to be promoted to a business analyst role.
I digress...
The reason for this post is to try and make you think about how the actions you are taking are really making you more agile (small 'a'). If your objective is to be able to handle change with as little pain as possible then following a hard set of inflexible rules is not going to help you too much.
Shipping software is a art that is not easy to teach by laying down a set of rules, in many ways it is much more like a creative activity than an engineering activity. Decisions have to be made that are not pure engineering decisions, they are not pure business decisions, nor are the decisions purely design oriented. It is a combination of all of these things and more.
Questions that need to be answered include; is the software aesthetically pleasing to the user, is the software functional, is the time right to release this to the market, etc..
There seems to be this constant flow of software with rules designed to help people become Agile, there are also more and more people professing to have the ultimate rule book for Agile software development.
In my opinion this is 90% bogus, the number of people that have a career telling other people how to ship software and have not actually shipped software in years (or ever!) amazes me.
If you want to be truly agile then drop as many tools as you can, learn to do more with less rules and restrictions, and most of all practice shipping software by actually shipping software!
There are two important parts of that last statement:
1. lightweight methods
2. software shipped
The concept of doing the simplest thing to achieve a goal, is an important part of eXtreme Programming. Traveling light (or not carrying baggage from previous experiences) is an important part of being agile. One of the aspects of agile that I always found attractive was the objective of enabling the development team to deal with change in short time frames.
While it may not be fully apparent, from the behaviour of many software development teams, the objective of developing software is to ship a product, a finished piece of working software. This desire to find better ways to get software shipped is clearly not something everyone in the industry shares. that is why we have collections of rules that appear to do nothing than keep people in jobs. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that in certain situations we need 5 people analyzing the business rules in order to determine how to build software that manages a complex business process. The reality I often see is that the business process is not that complex and the reason the team has 5 business analysts is because the career path for developers in that company is to be promoted to a business analyst role.
I digress...
The reason for this post is to try and make you think about how the actions you are taking are really making you more agile (small 'a'). If your objective is to be able to handle change with as little pain as possible then following a hard set of inflexible rules is not going to help you too much.
Shipping software is a art that is not easy to teach by laying down a set of rules, in many ways it is much more like a creative activity than an engineering activity. Decisions have to be made that are not pure engineering decisions, they are not pure business decisions, nor are the decisions purely design oriented. It is a combination of all of these things and more.
Questions that need to be answered include; is the software aesthetically pleasing to the user, is the software functional, is the time right to release this to the market, etc..
There seems to be this constant flow of software with rules designed to help people become Agile, there are also more and more people professing to have the ultimate rule book for Agile software development.
In my opinion this is 90% bogus, the number of people that have a career telling other people how to ship software and have not actually shipped software in years (or ever!) amazes me.
If you want to be truly agile then drop as many tools as you can, learn to do more with less rules and restrictions, and most of all practice shipping software by actually shipping software!
Friday, July 15, 2011
Cloud and Client chat on CodeCast
In this episode of CodeCast, Ken Levy interviews Dr. Neil Roodyn discussion the differences and scenarios around cloud and client computing. Topics includes applications running in the cloud, documents hosted in the cloud, and rich/smart clients that use the cloud as part of the solution, with more and more of a mixture of client and cloud within applications rather than one versus the other.
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Another week of wonder
The last few weeks have been action packed, and each week seems to have more than the last.
In the last month while in Sydney I have been to the Hotel, Hospitality and Design expo and the EduCause expo, both in Darling Harbour at the Sydney exhibition and convention center.
The nsquared team in Sydney has been working on optimizing the nsquared education pack for Windows 7 touch. This has been done on a range of devices; HP Touchsmart desktops, Tegatech TEGAV2 and the 3M 22 Inch touch screen.
The Managed Chatrooms website and service has been revamped and updated. Microsoft is among our customers of Managed Chatrooms, and our customers have stated using Managed Chatrooms for more events this month than ever before.
You may have noticed that Apple released a new product in March and the iPad app I wrote to help manage tasks on Exchange and SharePoint, ntask, has had an update to work better with Exchange 2003. Also on the iPad nsquared released coin swap, a game to teach children the value of money.
In the last month while in Sydney I have been to the Hotel, Hospitality and Design expo and the EduCause expo, both in Darling Harbour at the Sydney exhibition and convention center.
The nsquared team in Sydney has been working on optimizing the nsquared education pack for Windows 7 touch. This has been done on a range of devices; HP Touchsmart desktops, Tegatech TEGAV2 and the 3M 22 Inch touch screen.
The Managed Chatrooms website and service has been revamped and updated. Microsoft is among our customers of Managed Chatrooms, and our customers have stated using Managed Chatrooms for more events this month than ever before.
You may have noticed that Apple released a new product in March and the iPad app I wrote to help manage tasks on Exchange and SharePoint, ntask, has had an update to work better with Exchange 2003. Also on the iPad nsquared released coin swap, a game to teach children the value of money.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Enriched Customer Engagement at the Table
The February issue of Cutter IT Journal published an article I wrote on the experiences nsquared had building a table top solution for Telstra.
Telstra bought Microsoft Surface units to run the nsquared business pack and some custom software that the nsquared team built specifically to engage the Telstra small business customers.
Telstra bought Microsoft Surface units to run the nsquared business pack and some custom software that the nsquared team built specifically to engage the Telstra small business customers.
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