At my new customer (a big insurance company in Sweden) I have met so many friends and people I know from the past, that I am just amazed over how small Sweden is. Or IT in Sweden are a more correct way of putting it.

Here is a small list of people I’ve met so far:

• First day - met a friend that I knew from my first IT-job, at Skandia. Henrik something. I haven’t seen him since I stopped work there in 1999
• Second day - learned and met the chief business architect for my project… He is my neighbor from a year back. He met me the first time when I locked myself out and tried to pry the door open. He helped…
• Third day - met a friend from university that I hung with for the major part of the time there. We haven’t seen each...

The presentation yesterday went well. Just thought I’ll drop that in here since I have being bringing it up again and again.

About 120 people in the auditorium and circa 20-40 people listening in via video-link… quite cool, even though it made the presentation a bit harder. A funny (but nice) calmness came over me the minute I stepped up on the stage. I also managed to keep the timing of the presentation down to the minute (a first for me :))

The presentation was about SCRUM and it was quite well received. I’ve heard several people talking about it (both positive and negative word) already - which I take as a good thing. I could post the slides here if only BlogSpot allowed me.

So - continuing today on my road to a working environment, but much lesser amount of butterflies in the stomach…

When digging around for TDD stuff I have started a small series (?) about how to actually implementing the good ideas and promises from TDD.

Found another good article on the practicalities for Test Driven Development. This one is about Mock Objects.

The minute after you start to think about doing TDD through all your code you find yourself pondering about how to test only the current layer. For example the business layer has references to the Data Access layer (as it often do) but I only want to test the business layer. This is solve by Mock objects, which the article is about.

Also some issues about configuration arises. Like; how can I assure that the mocked objects are used in a test run but now in a debug run… There are some references about that also in the article.

Yesterday I started a new assignment. Still the insurance business but a very different company. This is so big in comparison. The IT-department has 150 employed developers to be compared with the three person from the last place.

This also reflects in the administration, some of it is quite cool - with some really impressive login-scripts and some is not so cool like waiting for a day for admin rights on your computer. But all in all its fun to do something new.

Soon the scary presentation will start… The butterflies has a gathering in my stomach. A short prayer and knowing that I have prepared will probably make them disappear…

Got a this link from a friend.

Check out step number 23 in this description on how to get from New York to Dublin in the easiest, fastest and safest way.

Also - I am now entering one of the more hectic periods of my life (with two free days for the next four weeks, if I remember correctly) so the blogging will probably stand back for a while. But I’ll keep you all posted.

The things I am going to do during this time include (strange combination, I must say):

• aying solo at a concert with SolnaBrass
• arting new assignment within my work
• . and ending the previous one
• ing talk about SCRUM in front of hundreds (brrrr)
• esenting two concerts with Gothenburg Brass Band
• ing host at the get-together after Bengt Eklunds funeral
• andard playing with the Salvation Army at Vasa

Well - interesting times are ahead. I am sure it will be fun… also

Here are some more pictures from the beautiful Hypplen (the place is nicer than it sounds, I promise).

It was surely a good weekend with a lot of winding down. Also my family are all very nice, which is so good when you get away like this. It’s all very easy-going. Even though some of them get quite nasty when it comes to games, especially Fia-med-knuff. :)

I spent the weekend in the archipelago of Gothenburg. It was great! Brilliant sunshine for one and a half day and then … games inside for the rest of the weekend.

I am a bit worried though, after the gaming session, that my relatives might not like me as much. I didn’t swept the floor with them but I won the prematch-battering (you know, I talked the most about my own abilities etc.) :)

Also we had a small scissors adventure as the before, during and after series shows above… I’ll add some more pictures later in the week.

This week by the way is my last at one customer and I have to prepare some big talk at my next…

Hectic week, now where have I heard that before

The next project will be done with Test Driven Development - I am really looking forward to this!

We have all read about TDD, on this pros and cons and how it is done (red, green, refactor or first write the test, fail it, fix it…). But i haven’t seen to much on how to actual write the code. How do you start off? In other words - show me the code!

But this article has some hints and tips on how to write test driven code for business and ui-layers. Especially from the Doing Test-Driven Development paragraph. The rest of the article is a very nice introduction to Nunit and other tools.

I’ll get back to you all when I have got the pieces together surrounding this.

This weekend a very inspirational and important brass teacher was taken home. Although I have known about his decease for quite some while now it’salways very sad when the end comes.

Bengt was one of those people that stick in your conscience from the first time you meet him. For my first rehearsal with GBB I was actually scared of him, but that all went away after just meeting him outside the rehearsal room. Since then Bengt has continued to fascinate me, give me valuable tips (both for playing and life) and being a great friend.

Some of the greatest things I have been doing with my instrument was through or via Bengt and GBB. I remember quite vivid some concerts from USA 2005, the amazing tour of New Zealand the same year or just some great rehearsals. Tips from Bengt help me each day in my playing.