Archive for Conferences
09.24.07
Posted in Conferences at 8:29 pm by kkj
It’s that time of the year again: September and time for JAOO. This year I have been asked to share my thoughts with a wider audience at the special JAOO blog on Version 2. It means, this posting will most likely be the only one about JAOO 2007 on this blog, and that you have to be well versed with Danish to read the subsequent impressions from the conference.
JAOO is the one conference, where I cannot move more than 10 meters before running into someone I know. It is simply amazing how among 1200 people this phenomenon seems to take place every year, regardless off the fact that I have only got some 240 people in my address book. I guess that means a) my address book is not complete and b) the concentration of people with whom I have a 1-degree (as in 6-degrees, remember?) relation is rather large here.
The keynote this Monday morning was refreshing. Robert C. Martin of ObjectMentor gave a good solid list, sprinkled with vivid examples of what to do and what to certainly NOT do when building software. For instance, the old truth that Netscape came to learn the hard way: “don’t ever throw out the old system … ever†was repeated, as was the fact that architects should be thrown from the ivy tower to the keyboard to ensure some sanity in frameworks.
Kresten Thorup acting as timeline from big-bang to agile software development. Robert C. Martin to the left.
The rest of my day prior to the party will be filled with virtualization … read all about it at Version2.
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05.21.07
Posted in Architecture, Conferences, SOA at 8:40 pm by kkj
In 2005 I was working as a consultant for Copenhagen County (now the Captial Region), getting myself involved in various internal and external it-projects. One of these revolved around the fact that all hospitals were required by law to enhance their EHR systems to report information about medicine given to patients during hospitalization to a central server at the Danish Medicines Agency. The deadline for having implemented this feature was originally set to January 1st. 2007.
At the time there was no common infrastructure for secure communication of information in the Danish health sector, so together with colleagues from the County of Ribe (now Region South) we started working on one. This became what is now known as the SOSI project a pilot, which tries out a single-signon infrastructure for web services with digital certificates. The project has now gone national and is being funded by Danish Regions.
While SOSI was being defined, MedCom was working on a similar project, “Den Gode Webservice†(DGWS). By means of the The National Board of Health, the two projects were brought together and coordinated: The single-signon assets from SOSI made it into DGWS and version 1.0 of the specification was released by MedCom last summer.
Since then, the SOSI project has made it into its final stages complete with a SAML IdP, clients and servers that communicate using DGWS over VPN with OCES digital certificates playing the role of credentials and adding non-repudiating and integrity. Project evalutation is imminent, and SOSI will presumably wrap up later this year.
It won’t disappear, though.
About six months ago, MedCom and The Danish Medical Association held a conference for decision makers with the intent of creating consensus for a national common medicines project (see my post about it). The conference was a huge success. Since then, The Danish Medicines Agency has become the driver of the project with MedCom and a number of other participants paving the road.
The Common Medicines project aims at making medicines information available where needed, when needed in the entire Danish Health Sector. This is done by defining a model for medicines data to be used initially among hospitals, private physicians, pharmacies, and retirement facilities along with web service interfaces, and a communication model, the infrastructure of which is based upon experiences from SOSI.
Though the technical details aren’t entirely completed yet, much work has already been done and the project is about to take off: Four pilot organisations have volunteered to update their systems with the changes required to communicate medicines data. This will be implemented in autumn of 2007 and pilot thu the early months of 2008. With good fortune, all hospitals should then be covered before 2009.
Last week MedCom and The Danish Medicines Agency held a workshop about the Common Medicines Project, and I gave a presentation of the security aspects in context of SOSI and DGWS.
An exciting project indeed!
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04.01.07
Posted in Architecture, Conferences, SOA at 8:43 pm by kkj
Ouch. It’s been another couple of months with no activity on this blog. I’ve been under siege by massive amounts of work, all of which decided to have a deadline just before Easter. Anyway, there’s a small pause right now, which I’ll hastily exploit to catch up a bit on my vapor trails.
Last week had representatives from the better part of the Danish Public Sector descend upon Ã…rhus at the annual OIO conference for a Tuesday and Wednesday packed with sessions. My schedule was interleaved with meetings so I only caught about half of what was going on (max). Not surprisingly, the keynote and the first couple of talks in the big hall focused at a high level on the status of what’s happened during the past year. Fine. Then a meeting and lunch.
Well fed I went to hear about the health of the Health Sector with some anticipation that plans or at least hints for the future of EHR in Denmark would be revealed. That would have been prudent now that a director has been found for the National EHR Organization. No so, and no word from the organization at all. Of course the new director doesn’t start until the 15. of April, but still …
Jens Rahbek Nørgaard / MedCom in vivid action
More meetings and day one ended with a party, with way too much beer, and with a slight intoxiaction at 2 in the morning. For that reason I had to start Wednesday rather late with lots of water and coffee, and the first session I attended was the ubiquitous DGWS presentation by none other that yours truly and Jens Rahbek Nørgaard from MedCom.
Jens put on a great performance, and despite all odds even my presentation went rather well, I thought.
I attended one more presentation, which featured a rather extreme case from Denmark`s Road Safety and Transport Agency, illustrating how tons of paperwork can be replaced by efficient digital processes. Very interesting and highly illustrative of the potential.
Another meeting, coffee and I must confess to leaving the conference early … Overall I had a great time and will be back next year.
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11.28.06
Posted in Architecture, Conferences, Presentations, SOA at 1:54 pm by kkj
This thursday I was invited to speak at a national strategy workshop on medicines data arranged by MedCom with the purpose of discussing the current situation, the vision, and what needs to be done to get there. The last speaker of the day, I presented DGWS from the context of the SOSI project and the challenge, which started it all: to be able to exchange data between EHR medicines modules and the national medicines profile (PEM) at The Danish Medicines Agency.
Rather early in the day, it was agreed that the vision for medication in Danish EHR should be:
- Health care personnel must have easy access to correct and up-to-date information about the current medication for the patients they treat.
- M.D.s must have easy access to complete information about drugs, their usage, and effect.
- Patients must have easy access to correct and up-to-date information about their own medicines and how to administer it.
All slides from the workshop are available from The Danish Medical Association where the conclusion of the workshop is also available (in Danish).
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10.28.06
Posted in Architecture, Conferences, Presentations, SOA at 1:57 pm by kkj
Wednesday
October 25-26th saw the annual conference on the status of Electronic Health Record (EHR) implementations in Denmark converge on Nyborg Strand Hotel with +500 attendees from regions, governmental units, vendors, and consulting agencies related to the sector. I showed up early to make sure I didn’t miss the keynote by the Danish Minister of Health, Lars Løkke Rasmussen.
In the wake of last year’s conference, the media decided to zoom in on the delays in EHR implementations w/respect to the original masterplan, and the debate became so heated that the Government decided to step in and restructure the effort. The result is that a new national organization is currently being formed with the intent of coordinating, shaping, and setting the direction of EHR, nationwide. The minister promised that the ambitions remain as high as always, but gave no deadline regarding actual EHR implementations.
I sat thru the second session, which had three conference organizers reflect over EHR development 2000-2006, which was OK, but not news. Alas, the session dragged on 15 minutes longer cutting the lunch break shorter and I had to rush a bit to check in, move luggage, network, and more. I was hoping to attend the next session on data access but had to make to a few phone calls and check email, so I ended up skipping not only that but the next one as well. Good thing I made it back at 17:00 for the last session of the day.
It turned out to be hilarious. An M.D, a former Minister of Health, a senior vendor representative, and a CIO were set up in a panel discussion titled “EHR on the other side of the ford” (i.e. once your’re not midstream anymore, but most likely have wet feet). All of the participants turned out to have strong opinions about not only the future, but also about the past. The M.D took the stand that EHR is basically a bad idea and defended this dubious viewpoint violently. Others fired back, resulting in a veritable trench warfare.
IMHO the only reason for introducing IT into the health sector (or any work environment, really) must be to enhance the way business is conducted in this case making individuals more effective, less cumbered by tedious routines, less prone to error, and generally more satisfied with their work. That implementations have failed to achieve these high goals sometimes even resulting in the opposite results does not mean the concept as such is wrong: No serious person would ever demand that flying be banned just because a single, defect airplane crashed and burned …
The day ended with the party that everyone came for 
and as usual it was great fun. Last year I confess to going to bed at 5 in the morning, but this year I had to lay low because of my presentation the day after.
Thursday
By some strange and still inexplicable miracle I made it up at 8 in the morning, got breakfast and actually attended the morning keynote. This was interesting stuff as the chairman of the board for the national EHR organization, Ib Valsborg, would be giving an update on the current state of affairs together with his colleague Lars Hagerup from Danish Regions.
Mr. Valsborg echoed the promises that the Minister of Health gave the morning before, but also said that the new national organzation would need the support and assistance from the regions, and that while some tasks would be centralized, others would remain local. Mr. Hagerup became more specific, saying among other things that integration would likely be the key task along with defining the overall architecture for the sector. The first task of the national group will be to define a new it-strategy.
I salute the decision to introduce national program management for EHR, something which has been sorely missed! We need a central organization that can coordinate efforts, enforce standardization, and ensure that the vision of making patient data available where needed, when needed, can be fulfilled.
Mr. Hagerup also mentioned that current EHR implementations are being evaluated by a consulting agency (Deloitte) and that five experts with extensive experience in the health industry are to ensure the right questions get asked … Silverbullet is proud to be represented as one of them thru my colleague Henrik Ibsen!
I ditched the next talk to go over my slides one last time, and went on at 11:00 in a session titled, “How can different standards work together?” along with Ronnie Ericsson of sundhed.dk, Leif H. Christiansen of Region H, and Kenneth B. Ahrensberg of the Danish Standards Association. I had 20 minutes to present the seemingly ubiquitous good webservice yet again. The challenge this time being that the audience could not be expected to know what SOAP is other than some water-soluble cleaning agent made from late animals. We got quite a good response overall, and I thought the presentation went well.
Mr. Kjelstrøm presenting
I sat in for about 10 minutes of the last session after lunch, which had some fellow from the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies give his 5 cents on the use of information technology in the future health sector. I found the presentation rather boring and left.
Overall the conference was good and I think better than last year. There had been some speculation on wether the formation of a new national EHR organization would mean the demise of conference. Not so: The organizers inivited everyone to Nyborg next year and I for one will be there.
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10.14.06
Posted in .NET, Architecture, Conferences, Presentations, SOA at 2:01 pm by kkj
Last Thursday the 5th of October just after the JAOO conference my colleague Ivan and I headed to suthern Funen along with some 70 other attendees for the MedCom seminar on web services. A two day event, our task was to give a technical presentation about DGWS and then spend the afternoon going into details about the .NET version of the Seal framework developed at Silverbullet over the past months. Specifically we were to teach the attendees the finer details of the framework thru a series of exercises for 8 hours.
At 11:00 following breakfast and a general introduction, I went on and presented DGWS once more without any issues. At 13:00 we had the excellent Restaurant buffet and at 14:00 everyone was back in the conference room. That’s when we ran into a bit of trouble: Just as he was about to plug in the VGA cable for the projector, Ivan’s ACER laptop decided to have a melt down. It went completely dead: Quote T.S.Eliot, “not with a bang, but a wimper”.
An unplanned pause of about 10 minutes passed in mild panic as we dug out the slides from CDs, copied the whole thing onto my MacBook Pro, fired up Parallels with Windows XP in it and started Microsoft Visual Studio. Finally Ivan was ready to continue and for the remainder of the day he fought bravely with the Mac keyboard trying to get as exotic characters as / and @ to appear. To his credit, despite being traumatised by a dead ACER and a Mac with and odd keyboard, he did a very good job. As we neared the end of the day at 18:00 most of the attendees had finished the first couple of exercises, and more than half were in the second part, a few completely finished. All in all a very satisfactory experience. And none the less for having the Mac save the day
Ivan presenting Seal.NET on my MacBook Pro
At 19:00 most of us went for the conference dinner party and had a terrific evening. One unexpected and very pleasant surprise was the entertainment by Jens Rahbæk Nørgaard who not only turned out to be a satirical entertainer, but a skilled one at that! These conference parties tend to last into the night, and the day after most of us wished the bar had closed before midnight.
The second day contained a series of presentations about the upcoming standards, based on DGWS. I thought this part went well too, but was happy that I had my turn the day before and could concentrate on sipping water! All in all I felt the conference was a great success. Kudos to MedCom!
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10.11.06
Posted in Architecture, Conferences, SOA at 2:02 pm by kkj
Last week was one of those intense ones that are jampacked with impressions, starting out with the annual JAOO conference in Århus, Denmark.
JAOO 2006 began for me on monday morning with a great keynote by Dr. Werner Vogels, the CTO & VP at Amazon, on “The Amazon.com Technology Platform: Building Blocks for Innovation”. Mr. Vogels started out with a soft introduction to Amazon and its evolution from single business to technology platform. The second half of the talk focused on some of the challenges in running a platform for multiple businesses and this was where things got interesting. With its gradual advancement from soft business talk to solid technical discussion, the talk was a great keynote. A pity, though, that mr. Vogels didn’t have a follow up where he got a chance to dive into the challenges and solutions to designing large scale ASP solutions. I would have been there.
I stayed on the SOA track thru monday and attended Gregor Hohpe and Ivo Totevs presentations. Gregor has a firm grasp of enterprise integration challenges and at a pace of 57.4 words / second manages to convey an awful lot of information in a very short time. He is a great speaker and I got so inspired from the talk on “Patterns in Service-Oriented Architectures” that I ended up buying his book. As for Ivo Totev, I am sorry, but I found the presentation a waste of time: A talk on SOA governance, which adresses the challenges and how to tackle them REGARDLESS of which product (if any) you choose to aid you would have been refreshing. Unfortunately, this talk was anything, but.
Kresten Krab Thorup opening JAOO 2006 on Monday morning
Monday ended with the conference party, which is a must-attend event if you’re there. Lots of good food, good company, and adequate amounts of beverages.
Tuesday I had a few meetings in the morning and arrived at noon for lunch, then attended “Bringing SOA to life: A new Danish Infrastructure” by Mikkel Hippe Brun. The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has come up with a model for exchanging webservice messages over SMTP in a secure, reliable fashion that uses the Danish National PKI infrastructure (OCES). A close cousin to the SOSI project, I found this approach quite interesting and I expect we will see some kind of convergence between the two initiatives in the long run.
My last session at this year’s JAOO was Jeff Sutherland’s, “Scrum Tuning: How to Make Good Scrum Implementations Better!”. Jeff is the Scrum guru and the session did presume that you were already implementing Scrum at your company, which was actually fine. In fact, this is the kind of session I would like to see more of at JAOO: the ones that presume you already know this or that issue and have come to discuss solutions and learn from those battle-scarred souls who made it back. On the downside I did find the use of function points somewhat less convincing. I thought serious professionals had long gone and buried that useless beast. Guess not.
JAOO is as much a networking event for me as it is a chance to get up to speed on what’s going on in areas of the industry that don’t have my immediate attention, and it excels at both! I compared OOPSLA to JAOO last year and I stick by my evaluation from back then: With its open sessions and great social acitivities, JAOO is much more my type of conference, and I will be back next year.
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10.21.05
Posted in Conferences, General Ramblings at 5:18 am by kkj
We’re rolling out of San Diego on bus headed for Mexico and Ensenada, Cinderella of the Pacific. It is not yet 9 in the morning and it’s a warm, but hazy day. The chauffeur is cracking jokes and we’re sipping coffee as we reach the border and head into Tijuana, Mexican neighbor to San Diego, without even showing passports.
Tijuana is such a contrast to its Californian counterpart: poor, dirty, and worn, it’s suburbs and sprawl resembling a landfill rather than residential areas. In short, this is not a place I would want to visit and I am relieved that we booked the long tour and won’t be getting off until some 70 miles south of here. It gets better as we drive along the coast, the haze clearing, and the landfills less evident, when we finally reach our destination.
Ahh, Mexico!
Ensenada is actually a quite nice place. In contrast to Tijuana you’re not being constantly bugged by streetwise salespeople trying to persuade you to buy something you don’t need. They are there, but not in great numbers. The city is quite clean, and has a nice harbor and the largest flag-pole I ever saw. You can definitely shop there, but we didn’t find much worth buying and came back with little loot. Check out the gallery.
While on the trip, we evaluated Oopsla and came up with some points. On the upside:
- Wide variety of content. The conference has the usual tutorials, a peek into what the future might hold (onward!), keynotes, code camps, design fests, and more making it very versatile and wide in its scope.
- Not too big. The size is manageable, and makes it a lot easier to get actively involved rather than just being a listener.
- Generally high standard. Speakers at Oopsla come in different shapes and sizes as would be expected (and required), but they are generally dedicated professionals with varying presentation-skills.
And on the the downside:
- Poor structure. The website of the Oopsla conference is in defiance of all guidelines for structuring a website and it is really hard to get a clear overview of what goes on there. When constrasting Oopsla with JAOO, which is about the same size, I find it much easier to get a clear picture of what I want to see in the latter. There was a 30 minutes guidance for Oopsla-newbies monday evening on how to find your way around Oopsla. Well that’s fine, but it was 2 days too late and shouldn’t be necessary imho.
- Annoying payment model. At Oopsla you pre-register for tutorials, which you pay for separately. There are many tutorials and some of the ones I wanted to see ran concurrently so I had to pick. What do you do, when after 30 minutes it turns out that the next 3 hours will be a waste of time? You can leave, but you cannot go see the other tutorial instead. That sucks, and imho Oopsla should learn from JavaOne or JAOO where you can pop in and out of sessions at your leisure.
Did I learn something, get new inspiration? Yes, the trip has been rewarding and I will consider attending Oopsla again in the future.
Tomorrow I’ll get up at 4 in the morning and start my 24 hour journey home. Goodnight California. Until next time.
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10.20.05
Posted in Conferences, General Ramblings at 7:21 am by kkj
Oopsla 2005 ended today, an event I missed on purpose as my one tutorial ran from 8:30-12:00 noon and there didn’t seem to be much more for me in the afternoon. Today’s presentation was on “Models and Aspects - Handling Cross-Cutting Concerns in the Context of MDSD”.
The sun sets over San Diego harbor
I have used AOSD for some time now, leveraged both Aspect/J and AspectWerkz for handling cross-cutting concerns in enterprise applications, and even given presentations on the topic. On top of that I’ve been using code generators, notably XDoclet, to generate various infrastructure artifacts from source code, but until today I was somewhat unclear on what exactly the term “Model Driven Development” encompassed. More so, I was curious to learn how to combine the two techniques and what exactly could be learned from such an approach.
Markus Völter and Martin Lippert made a good presentation, which explained the two topics and then went on to detail various patterns in the context of AOSD combined with MDSD. The most fun part was when the discussion went into modelling and what constitutes a domain specific model as defined by its domain specific meta model, which in terms can be described by a (domain-agnostic) meta-meta model, defining a language for domain specific models. Go figure 
Certainly more clear on the definitions, I took the concepts of domain specific modelling with me as being something I am already doing, but which I might take a more structured approach toward. Also, it was good to hear others echo my own reservations on AOSD as being a last resort for those issues that hard to specify otherwise. A good presentation, and cudos from me!
We left Oopsla for yet another shopping spree at the Fashion Valley Mall (phew: good thing we’re going home soon) and then strolled down to the harbor to visit the now retired aircraft carrier, The U.S.S Midway which was in service from 1945 through the first Gulf War until 1992. I got a little overboard so to speak and took quite a few pictures. The day ended with beer in the sunset along the pier, and nice californian cuisine at Tom Ham’s Lighthouse located at the beautiful point of Harbor Island. Check out the pictures, which are void of Oopsla impressions …
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10.19.05
Posted in Conferences, General Ramblings at 5:46 am by kkj
Man I was tired this morning, when awaking after only 4,5 hours of sleep I scrambled up to get a bath and meet my colleagues down stairs in the hotel lobby. We decided to check out the breakfast restaurants in neighboring “Little Italy” and had a decent meal, which we did not rush. All this resulted in me missing the morning keynote at Oopsla when arriving at little to 10.
A fountain near the Shakespeare Theatre in Balboa Park, San Diego
Next up I went for a panel discussion on “Fostering software robustness in an increasingly hostile world”, which was interesting although somewhat depressing to listen to. Yesterday someone was crying for a call to arms to leave OO behind and give way to the new black, whatever that might turn up to be, and today a panelist was complaining that software can never ever become truly robust because it is not really real?! What is up with all this whining? Instead of complaining what we can’t do there should be focus on what we have truly achieved within software development, and where we can go from here to improve that which is not perfect. I am with Dave Thomas and his extreme statement that CMM is nonsense and that truly great software is not the result of rigorous processes and control.
Lunch again at the Fashion Valley Mall and I was back for the afternoon tutorial on making The Rational Unified Process (RUP) Agile. I knew the basic concepts of RUP and have practiced XP-style agile development on some projects, and was curious to hear how an *extensive*, commercial process framework such as RUP could become light and flexible to work with. The talk was given by Michael Hirsch and I must say he did a good job at taking a pragmatic approach to RUP, while still leveraging its advantages amongst others the templates for artifacts. Based on 8 years of experience with RUP and slightly fewer with the agile version, mr. Hirsch presented a methodology which sounds very useful, and I will look forward to reading the rest of the handouts.
One major critique of RUP is that it is commercial in nature, owned by IBM (previously Rational), and that the business strategy surrounding the framework has always been to provide tooling to assist with configuring RUP and building artifacts (e.g. UML diagrams). If you want to use RUP you’ll have to buy documentation, Rational Rose and possibly other tools … and you need a license per developer so since Rose is *really* expensive that is guaranteed to ruin you. To his credit, Mr. Hirsch gave practical directions on how to use RUP without Rose (but still with the commercially available documentation) and hence cut costs.
At 5pm we all headed to Balboa Park, a nice spot in the middle of San Diego, which has the Zoo, and ton of museums all set in spanish style buildings from the turn of the 19th century. I had made reservations at “El Prado”, which sports Californian Cuisine and very well made too. Check out the gallery.
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