A friend of mine has a Far Side desk calendar that he describes as a barometer for how busy he is. Some days he finds himself tearing off a whole bunch of pages because he’s been too busy or distracted to tear one off each day.

I noticed a couple of weeks ago that I haven’t blogged anything for over six months. It’s been hectic. I’m planning to be blogging more over the coming weeks and months. I’ve got a ton of things to write up, ranging from planning and estimation—it’s no wonder we are useless at it, we don’t even know where to start!—to architecture—why you wouldn’t want to go on a date with Maven—by way of build and release engineering—why Ivy means Ant is still the king of cool.

JAOO Australia#

I’m in Sydney at the moment where I’ll be speaking at JAOO Australia which is in a couple of weeks time. It’s like a pocket-sized, portable version of the European JAOO conference. In fact it is two conferences, one in Sydney (May 5-8) and one in Brisbane (May 11-14). There are two days of tutorials and two days of conference proper, and it looks like it’s going to be great fun. Both conferences are small enough (a few hundred people) that there will be ample opportunity to hang out with speakers and ask the questions you really want answered. And buy them beer.

I’ll be Pimping my Architecture and doing tutorials on BDD (principles and methodology) and TDD in Java (technical workshop), the latter with the lovely Erik Doernenburg.

If you can get to either city on those dates I would highly recommend it. As of writing neither event has sold out so there is still time. JAOO is one of the best geek conferences I know, with a great mix of technology (languages and frameworks), methodology (with an Agile flavour), architecture (from cloud to iPhone) and soft stuff (Your brain is deceiving you. Yes you. Even though you know it is!)