Last year Leonard Richardson gave a talk on QCon that included a maturity model for RESTful web services. The model is a good way to sneak up on understanding REST principles and the authors of REST in Practice are using it to help their discussion of how to use REST. Here’s my take on explaining the model, which I found helpful in my understanding of what makes REST tick:

Richardson Maturity Model: steps toward the glory of REST

When I discussed VersionControlTools I said that it was an unscientific agglomeration of opinion. As I was doing it I realized that I could add some spurious but mesmerizing numbers to my analysis by doing a survey. Google's spreadsheet makes the mechanics of conducting a survey really simple, so I couldn't resist.

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One of the goals that my colleagues and I urge on our clients is that of a completely automated deployment process. Automating your deployment helps reduce the frictions and delays that crop up in between getting the software "done" and getting it to realize its value. Dave Farley and Jez Humble are finishing up a book on this topic - Continuous Delivery. It builds upon many of the ideas that are commonly associated with Continuous Integration, driving more towards this ability to rapidly put software into production and get it doing something. Their section on blue-green deployment caught my eye as one of those techniques that's underused, so I thought I'd give a brief overview of it here.

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I’ve been a regular speaker at the QCon and JAOO conferences over the last few years. At QCon London this year, I’m involved in a somewhat off-beat track of talks. Software Developers have often had a habit of focusing primarily on the mechanics of developing software well, and not thinking much about the societal value of that software. This is a common strand in many professions, but as the influence of software development grows, I feel it’s increasingly important that we get more engaged in the consequences of the software we build.

This track is a chance to explore some of these issues. As well as myself, there are talks about some work done with UNICEF to make effective use technology in much poorer parts of the world, the role of IT in reducing carbon footprint, and the contribution of team diversity to innovation.

If you spend time talking to software developers about tools, one of the biggest topics I hear about are version control tools. Once you've got to the point of using version control tools, and any competent developers does, then they become a big part of your life. Version tools are not just important for maintaining a history of a project, they are also the foundation for a team to collaborate. So it's no surprise that I hear frequent complaints about poor version control tools. In our recent ThoughtWorks technology radar, we called out two items as version control tools that enterprises should be assessing for use: Subversion and Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS). Here I want to expand on that, summarizing many discussions we've had internally about version control tools.

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The family medical issue has been resolved happily, so I’m free to go back on the road. We’ve thus rescheduled the events I was supposed to do last month in Texas.

• On February 23rd I’ll be speaking at DFW Scrum in Dallas.
• On February 25th ThoughtWorks is organizing a technology forum in Austin.

As is usual for me, I haven’t planned exactly what I’ll talk about yet, but it’ll revolve around my usual topics of software design and agile methods.

Here's a common misconception about agile methods. It centers on the way user stories are created and flow through the development activity. The misconception is that the product owner (or business analysts) creates user stories and then put them in front of developers to implement. The notion is that this is a flow from product owner to development, with the product owner responsible for determining what needs to be done and the developers how to do it.

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Time for another update on my DSL book's progress, since I've not been writing anything else recently.

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I’m afraid I’ve had to cancel my speaking events in Dallas and Austin next week due to a family medical problem. As I write this, it’s not clear how serious the problem is going to be, but there is a good chance that I won’t be able to travel to Texas next week. As a result we felt it was best to cancel the events, while we still have a few days notice. We do intent to reschedule as soon the as dust settles. My Texas ThoughtWorkers are very keen to have me come out and do these talks, so we want to do them as soon as we reasonably can.

My apologies for this, and I hope you understand. In particular I want to thank the various collaborators in organizing these events for being very understanding under the awkward circumstances.