I started martinfowler.com back in 2000, now its grown to around 3.5 million words in 500 pages, getting about 200,000 page views a month. One problem with the site is that it looks retro even for 2000 and seriously needs some cosmetic surgery. Another is that it’s not easy to browse to find useful articles.

So now the dsl book (which weighs in at 1.2 million words) is pretty much done with, I need to give martinfowler.com some love in these (and some other) departments. So I’m currently working on a nicer look for the website. I’ve also decided to write a series of “guide pages” - these are pages devoted to a single topic (such as agile software development) that highlight which pages on my website are likely to be useful on that topic.

I have these mocked up now to a point where I’m reasonably happy with them. Now the task is to apply these changes to the current website. My task is eased to some degree by the fact that all the HTML pages are generated from XML sources, but even so it will take some time to ensure everything looks reasonable. I also have a lot of travels coming up in the next few months, so I’m not predicting any delivery dates.

In June I gave a talk at Agile Brazil. During the conference my colleague Paulo Caroli and I were grabbed to give an interview for InfoQ Brazil. We touched on several topics: acceptance testing, polyglot programming, my DSL book, REST, and continuous delivery.

Over the last couple of months my DSL book has been through production and will shortly head off to the printers. Part of this process is copy-editing, and I’ve now updated the rough-cut to use the copy-edited text. So now any typos you see in the rough-cut are genuine errors, thus I won’t ignore them any more.

If you’re interested in hearing more about DSLs, Neal Ford and I will be giving our full-day tutorial on DSLs at JAOO again this year. We’re hoping the book will make its conference debut there as well.

Last week I attended the Agile 2010 conference in Orlando. Agile 20xx is the major US agile-oriented conference whose roots go back to XP Universe and the Agile Development Conference. I've not been a regular attender of the main agile conferences, but I did go last year as well. Rather than make an attempt at a consolidated description, here are a few scattered impressions.

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Next month, I’ll be making the long journey down to Australia to spend ten days or so in Melbourne. Thus far I have a couple of talks booked. The main reason is to give a keynote at Agile Australia. I’ll also be speaking at Agile Melbourne. In both cases I’ll be doing a Suite of Talks, but I expect to pick mostly different topics for the two of them.

One of the steady themes I've seen throughout my career is that of the nature and importance of software development. Recently a prospect told one of our salespeople that "software is like sewage pipes, I want it to work reliably and I don't want to know about the details". This is the kind of approach that Nicholas Carr talked about in IT Doesn't Matter. On a contrasting note we've done work for many businesses where IT has been a clearer strategic enabler to their business, allowing them to enter new markets or significantly increase their market share. So is IT a utility, like sewage pipes, or a strategic asset?

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A couple of weeks ago I was in Paris with Neal Ford to speak at USI 2010. Our talk looked at some aspects of why agile works. Rather than look at the techniques which is how agile does its thing, we looked more at some of the underlying forces - focusing on communication and feedback. The video is now available. (The introduction is in French but the talk is in English. Sadly my French is barely sufficient to order at a restaurant.)

A common thing you find in agile projects is that the development team sits in a single open team room. It was advocated early on in Extreme Programming and called out as one of primary practices in the second edition. Agilists favor a open team room as it promotes lots of informal and deep communication between people on the team.

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Over the weekend I’ve had a few emails from people in response to scams on craigslist. The scammer has been posting fake job adverts, using my name, for a driver or personal assistant. In case someone checks here I thought I should make it clear that I have never made any postings on craigslist and any postings you see there with my name are false.

I've not seen myself as an iFanboy. I didn't get an iPhone for ages after it came out, and only got one because it was the only way to upgrade my data plan to 3G. I use a mac, but I also have an Ubuntu desktop. But I have got an iPad, and I think it's a significant product.

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In a couple of weeks, I’ll be making my first trip to Brazil (and South America). I’ll arrive in Rio on Jun 13 and give a talk there on the 14th. After that I’ll head over to Porto Alegre and hang out at our office until Agile Brazil, where I’ll be doing a Keynote. My Rio and Agile Brazil talks will be similar - in that I’ll be doing a suite of talks, although I’ll probably not use the same suite in each place.

After sorting out the Final Draft for production, I rebuilt the rough-cut, which is now live on the site.

The biggest change with the content of the Final Draft is that I have three new pattern chapters for external DSLs from my colleague Rebecca Parsons: Regex Table Lexer, Recursive Descent Parser, and Parser Combinator. I’ve also reworked the “Hello Antlr” topic into the Parser Generator pattern.

I’ve now reached another significant step in my DSL book: Final Draft. This is the moment when I declare that I’m done with my content and release it to production. Copy-editing will begin soon, as well indexing, and various other sundry task to turn final text into a book ready to go to the printers.

It doesn’t mean that I’m completely done with the book. I will have to review the copy edits to ensure they are OK. I will also be working intimately with the production process, helping to improve the output for Safari Books Online and assisting the print production. I’ll also fix any errors spotted in the content, such as from people commenting on the rough-cut.

But the important step is that I’m done with the major thinking. I can’t do any big work on the content now unless it’s an emergency, so I’ll only be tidying up little things. I feel a sense of relief, a knowledge that it’s time to let the book go.