BCS SPA2010 conference

Final day of the conference - it's gone much too quickly as usual. My favourite session to date has been the brief whirlwind tour of agile practices given by Gwyn Morfey and Laurie Young of New Bamboo - "the Sword of Integration". This was a highly interactive session that involved everyone standing up and moving about enthusiastically, which despite the cramped room, meant that we all ended up remembering something instantly useful from the session.

By the way, the sword of integration itself is just one example of an instant solution to a pressing problem. The situation was that multiple developers checking in their changes would cause each other to have merge conflicts. The solution: a paper "sword" quickly assembled, which when held conferred on the holder the right to check in - and hit anyone who checked in when they shouldn't. The principle being illustrated is "just try it" - there is no need to get it absolutely right first time. If it doesn't work, we can change it later.

Real-time arrival information for London Buses

... should be arriving some time in 2011 - provided, of course, that there are no unforeseen traffic problems :-)

By the way, the link in that post has become obsolete. Try this one instead.

Meanwhile, some enterprising private individual has connected live running information from various feeds with Google's Map API to create Live Bus - but for the stops I am principally interested in, it has no information feeds as yet.