Northern lights

Northern lights Greetings from north Finland, where I'm at XP2006 in Oulu with north European luminaries like Morten Kromberg and Gitte Christensen of Dyalog, and Jutta Eckstein, the XP coach.

If the light never changed
I’d go mad in an hour.
Marilyn Hacker

I’ve already learned lessons worth the whole trip. From Geoffrey & Emily Bache, an alternative to defining unit tests as assertions about the states of variables. Instead, software can write a narrative of what it's doing, and a testing framework can compare narratives. And from Professor Giancarlo Succi, that there is really no way to recover a presentation when the chairman truncates it. Obvious in retrospect, but I had no idea; a lesson well worth learning.

The sun at midnight
tangled in red marks
a north truer than magnetic

Another surprise: Finns not only have a taste for cider, but keep a light perry, “Golden Cup”, on draft, serving it in pints with a fistful of ice. Bit girly, but a very refreshing summer drink.

Posted by SJT at June 19, 2006 10:10 PM