September 29th, ThoughtWorks will hold a day of seminars and a tutorial in Stockholm, Sweden. The seminars are free. I will talk about alternative languages, Martin Fowler will talk about software design in the 21st century, and another ThoughtWorks speaker will talk about DSLs for functional testing.

The tutorial is a half day tutorial given by Martin Fowler and me. We will talk about domain specific languages.

If this sounds interesting, go in and find more information and register here. Hurry, though - places are limited!

3 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: domain specific languages, dsls, martin fowler, seminar, stockholm, thoughtworks, tutorial. | #

ThoughtWorks will give two free seminars at Berns, Tuesday April 21, 2009.

The morning seminar will be given by Marcus Ahnve, talking about the business value of lean and agile, and how it can serve as a competitive advantage - especially in difficult times.

The afternoon seminar will be given by Zach Exley, who will give a behind-the-scenes look at the technological side of the Barack Obama campaign.

ThoughtWorks founder and chairman Roy Singham will kick off both seminars by giving his views on why  ha believes Scandinavia has a great future in the area of software development.

The events are open for anyone - and you can attend either one or both. For registration and more info: http://connect.thoughtworks.com/stockholmEvent/.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: agile, presentations, thoughtworks. | #

Last Tuesday ThoughtWorks hosted a Geek Night, where I was the headline. My presentation was about Creating languages for the JVM, which as it turns out is a quite broad topic. The London office do these kind of geek nights now and again, and this time we ended up being about full capacity for what the office could hold, which is about 50-60 people. It was really crowded, actually. That is a good problem to have, though. I am glad so many turned up to see me do a two hour rambling presentation that ended up being like a non-stop fire hose of information.

I’m not going to try to summarize the actual presentation. There were way to much information in it for that. Luckily, SkillsMatter had a film camera there, and I’ve been told the video should be up anytime. Once that happens I will post about it here. In the meantime, the slides can be found here: http://olabini.com/presentations/CreatingALanguageForTheJVM.pdf.

It was an interesting subject to present about though. I think this material could easily be a one-day tutorial. I wonder if anyone would be interesting in having such a tutorial at their conference? And whether anyone would show up for such a subject…

It was fun, though. I had a great time, and I hope the people who showed up didn’t end up being disappointed with the material.

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: geek night, jvm, languages, programming languages, thoughtworks. | #

I would like to announce that ThoughtWorks Sweden is now in motion. We have business cards and an office. Everyone is returning from their long lovely Swedish summer vacations.

This means that ThoughtWorks Sweden is ready, and available for work. If you or your business have a project you need help with, don’t hesitate to contact me (at obini@thoughtworks.com) or Marcus Ahnve (at mahnve@thoughtworks.com).

We are located in Stockholm, but we are open for work anywhere in the Nordic regions.

So what kind of work are we most suited for? Our sweet spot is in delivery and technical advisory regarding Java, Ruby and JRuby. And if you’re interested in understanding how our Agile approach can change your company, we can do organizational transformation projects and also coaching and advisory.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch!

3 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: sweden, thoughtworks. | #

I few months back I blogged about the possibility that ThoughtWorks would come to Sweden. Well, this is now reality. I have the extreme honor to be a part of this initiative together with Marcus Ahnve (who blogged about it here). If you read that blog you will know that Marcus will head the Swedish operation. I am immensely happy about having him as my new colleague and also boss. =)

People might ask what my role in this new office will be. That’s a valid question. My main goal is to stay out of trouble - and trying my very best to not scare potential customers away. Marcus is extremely capable and will handle all challenges, which means that I’ll do my best to bask in the glory of opening an new office. I might also have a hand in any billable work we do, and help out with recruitment and possibly even (shudder) marketing.

Not sure if you catched the meaning in that last sentence, but let me spell two points out. We will be selling work in Sweden from day one. I will be one of the consultants sold and that means that if you have an Ruby or JRuby work you want to start up, this might be an excellent time to call your local ThoughtWorks office… =)

The recruitment point is simply this. We plan on accumulating the best people we can find - as we aim to do in every country we enter. If you feel like you could fit this bill, mail me and we can talk.

It’s important to note that this operation will initially be very low profile. Don’t expect center folds in DN’s Economy pages. We will work mostly with word-of-mouth. So if you hear of someone that might need our help, don’t hesitate to mention our name. And even though we are low profile, we will still have the resources of the whole company to draw on. A 1000 ThoughtWorkers. That feels rather good, and it should feel even better for any prospective clients.

One thing I have been a bit worried about is my commitment to JRuby, and other open source projects. I assure everyone I’ll do my best to live up to these commitments. Sleep be damned!

These are exciting times. I for one is looking forward to it very much. Me and Marcus will officially start on this from June this year. Get in touch if you have any questions. It’s my name separated with dots at gmail, or obini at the official thoughtworks domain.

4 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: sweden, thoughtworks. | #

I am not sure how well it comes across in my blog posts, but joining ThoughtWorks have been the best move of my life. I can’t really describe what a wonderful place this is to be (for me at least). I sometimes try - in person, after a few beers - but I always end up not being able to capture the real feeling of working for a company that is more than a company.

I’m happy at being with ThoughtWorks. It’s as simple as that - I feel like I’ve found my home.

So imagine how happy I am to tell you that ThoughtWorks is exploring opportunities for an office in Sweden!

Now, I am one of the persons involved in this effort, and we have been talking about it for a while (actually, we started talking about it for real not long after I joined). But now it’s reality. The first trips to Sweden will be in January. ThoughtWorks will be sponsoring JFokus (which is shaping up to be a really good conference, by the way. I’m happy to have been presenting there the first year). We will have a few representatives at JFokus, of course. I will be there, for example. =)

Of course, exploring Sweden is not the same thing as saying that an office will actually happen. But we think there are good reasons to at least consider it. I personally think it would be a perfect fit, but I am a bit biased about it.

So what are we doing for exploration? Well, of course we have started to look into business opportunities and possible clients. We are looking at partnerships and collaboration. We are looking at potential recruits. But really, the most important thing at this stage is to talk to people, get a feeling for the lay of the land, get to know interesting folks that can give us advice and so on. And that is what our travels in January will be about.

So. Do you feel you might fit any of the categories of people above? We’d love to meet you and talk - very informally. So get in touch.

This is exciting times for us!

3 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: jfokus, sweden, thoughtworks. | #

Friends! ThoughtWorks is hiring Ruby developers all over the world, but right now San Francisco is the hottest place to be. So if you’re located in the Bay Area and want to work with Ruby and Rails, don’t hesitate to make contact.

The time since I joined ThoughtWorks about 6 months ago have been the best of my life, and of all our offices around the world, I like the San Francisco one best. ThoughtWorks is really the home for people passionate about development and people who love Ruby.

If you have been following my blog, you know about Oracle Mix and other interesting things we have been doing out of the SF office. And there’s more to come - exciting times!

Could ThoughtWorks in San Francisco be your home? Take contact with recruiting here: http://www.thoughtworks.com/work-for-us/apply-online.html, or email me directly and I’ll see to it that your information gets to the right place!

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: ruby, thoughtworks. | #

Rich Manalang just posted a very nice entry on the Oracle AppsLab about the technology behind Oracle Mix, how we developed it and so on. Read it here.

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: jruby on rails, mix, oracle, thoughtworks. | #

The last 5 weeks, a team consisting of me, Alexey Verkhovsky, Matt Wastrodowski and Toby Tripp from ThoughtWorks, and Rich Manalang from Oracle have created a new application based on an internal Oracle application. This site is called Oracle Mix, and is aimed to be the way Oracles customers communicate with Oracle and each other, suggesting ideas, answering each others questions and generally networking.

Why is this a huge deal? Well, for me personally it’s really kinda cool... It’s the first public JRuby on Rails site in existance. It’s deployed on the “red stack”: Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Database, Oracle SSO, Oracle Internet Directory. And JRuby on Rails.

It’s cool. Go check it out: http://mix.oracle.com.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: jruby, jruby on rails, mix, oracle, thoughtworks. | #

Chad Wathington recently posted on the official ThoughtWorks Studios blog a post called Many Facets of Ruby. I would like to expand on some of the points on it, and how I see it. To be sure, what is posted on the TW Studios blog is the “official” ThoughtWorks views - whereas what I write in this blog is purely my own opinions, with no relationship to ThoughtWorks at all.

The point Chad writes about is that ThoughtWorks lately have been talking a lot about JRuby, in such a way that it’s easy to get the impression that we as a company have chosen one implementation over the others. As Chad writes, that’s not correct.

I’ve probably done the same thing in my blog. Obviously, I really like JRuby and hope it will work out well. I really like Rubinius effort and I predicted a while back that Rubinius may take over after MRI as the standard C Ruby implementation. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the the other approaches around. MRI and YARV definitely has strong points going for them (MRI and JRuby are still the only fully working implementations of Ruby). But when IronRuby, XRuby, Rubinius, YARV, Garden Points and Cardinal is more complete, the Ruby environment will be that much richer for it.

I’m not in this game for a specific implementation. I would use Ruby no matter if there was a JRuby or not. It’s just that JRuby solves some of my problems, and allows me to hack on something that I know a segment of the Ruby user group will find useful. I’m in this for the language. I have chosen Ruby as my language, but the language is the same over the implementations. And it’s going to be really exciting in the Ruby space the next few months.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: ruby, thoughtworks. | #