Vision Summit 2016 is probably my craziest conference trip to date. It took 25000 kilometres in distance and over 30 hours of travel just to attend 2 days event. Did I mention that I decided to go and bought all my tickets 5 days before? Yes, it was pretty crazy :–)

Was it worth it? Hell yeah! It was a huge VR conference, with over 1000 participants and lots of cool things to see :–) .. Plus, apparently all devs taking part in the event are going to receive free HTC Vive dev kit – nice surprise!

Free Google Cardboard Public Speaking app

A well known fact – many of us are afraid of speaking in front of an audience.

Actually, many people fear public speaking more then they fear death – sounds pretty serious :–)

Did you know that practicing in virtual reality can remove this fear? It may not be obvious at first, but speaking in front of a virtual audience can boost your confidence in the real world.

With the start of 2016 I’ve started working on a new project. MarineVerse – all about sailing in virtual reality. I am having quite a bit of fun working on it, combining my passion for sailing and technology.

I am working on MarineVerse together with Olga, with a great result. For example, check out the awesome logo :–)

Currently I am using Unity to build simple cardboard apps and also experimenting with GearVR. Below you can see me showing an early version of “Point of Sail” app.

Also, finally I’ve signed up to a sailing club in Melbourne and with a start of Feburary I will be joining a sailing course. Looking forward to it :–)

Coming back to MarineVerse, I am working on it with full steam ahead. There is a landing page and blog.

Please follow MarineVerse on twitter and like it on Facebook. Cheers :–)

Last weekend I’ve been to CampJS.

It was 4 days event held on a camp site in Queensland, Australia. Imagine mixture of conference, hackathon and social event. It works great and I highly recommend this format :–) ( Checkout the photos on twitter )

Thank you everyone who made CampJS a blast :–)

ArtSocks VR

During the weekend I’ve decided to experiemnt with virtual reality in the browser.

I’ve used webvr-boilerplate to build simple virtual art gallery prototype.

To make it more fun, I’ve used websockets so you can be in the gallery with someone else.

Below list of images I’ve used in the demo:

1. hydrangea polka
2. Autumn Leaves (Teal)
3. Parallel Universe
4. june & her crocodile
5. infuse.

Please have a look at a demo – it works the best in VR :–) (open in browser on the phone and click VR icon)

PS. One of the great things abotu CampJS was ability to show what you are building and get ideas and feedback from people around you. Ben from SceneVR showed me how easy it is to build something similar in SceneVR. It’s really cool project, check it out :–)

Get Game of Life for Cardboard here.

What is it?

It’s pretty much in the name :–) Have a look at screenshot to get an idea of what it is.

What is special about this “Game of life” is, that you get to experience it in Virtual Reality, giving you a new, unique perspective.

You can learn more about Cardboard here and read about Game of life on wikipedia.

How is it made?

The app is made using Unity 5. I’ve started learning Unity recently and I am impressed how easy it’s to get started. They have good tutorials that get you going and assets store full of things you can use in your apps.

It’s really simple implementation written in C#, using SDK.

What’s next?

I’ve seen a great qoute on VR sometime ago:

Virtual Reality is BY FAR the biggest delta I've ever seen between what it looks like from the outside vs what it feels like on the inside.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) October 26, 2015

I agree, and what it means is that you really need to get your hands on a Cardboard and try out the Game of Life for yourself. :–)

What is it?

One definition could be:

Delivery engineering team enables others to deliver business value faster.

Others, in this context, relates to product/project software delivery teams.

It seems to be a fairly new term, judging by the lack of definition in google or a recent tweet from #devopsdays in Melbourne:

Finally an appropriate name for what i actually do - Delivery Engingeering. Thanks #devopsdays

— griggle (@griggle) July 16, 2015

Another, maybe more common name seems to be “tooling team”.

It’s definitely not a “devops team”.

What’s in?

In the delivery engineering team, that I am a part of, some of the metrics we are trying to improve are:

• CI Build time
• Deploy time
• New server creation time
• New production like environment creation time
• New developer laptop setup time

I guess there are many ways to go about moving above, but in the teams I’ve worked with, the day to day often was:

• Moving software from a legacy platform to a new one. (Think AWS/docker migration)
• Creating tools and practices to support the above.
• Technology evangelism, training & support for product teams.

What’s out?

The product teams should have full freedom and responsibility to run their apps in production.

So it’s not the responsibility of a delivery engineering team to:

• Upgrade frameworks and libraries used by a product team. The product team itself should do it.
• Carry a pager, be on-call as support for production systems (unless those are the systems that delivery engineering team is a custodian of, for example CI server)
• Be a gate keeper on a path to production. The product teams themselves can decide what and when to release.

Techniques & Practices

Some of the techniques and practices important for a delivery engineering team:

• Team rotation
• Continuous Delivery
• Showcase

Do you need a delivery engineering team?

Maybe :–)

You most likely need delivery engineering, and if you are big enough, you may decide to form a team around it. The size I have experience with and seems to work OK, is one small delivery engineering team for roughly three product teams. To use spotify terminology, delivery engineering team is part of a tribe and supports squads.

To sum up

This is based on my experience, what do you think? :–)

Are you a member of delivery engineering team? What do you think is important to share?

Are you a “customer” of delivery engineering team, for example a member of product team? What are your toughts on having a delivery engineering team?

I’ve launched my new pet project HeCoSiRe and you can be part of it ;)

So what is it about?

Functionally, the vision is to have a platform to track how you feel and generate insights into your health.

Adults get an average of two to four colds per year(source) I’ve got mine over the x-mas break. Not fun, but a good motivation for a pet project.

From technology point of view, it’s just an excuse to learn more about tools involved (Android, Rails and machine learning + more?).

So how can you get involved?

Problem: Red build

Unless your Jenkins project just stopped building with this exception hudson.plugins.git.GitException: Failed to fetch from git@github.com you are unlikely to get much of this post ;)

I guess there might be bunch of the reasons why you could see this message, but here is what happend to me..

I’ve been introduced to one to one team feedback by Pat Kua in 2011. To this date, it’s one of my favourited practices in an agile project ( I recommend Pat’s blog post series you can find here ).

During last 12 months or so, I was luckly enough to work in a team that was interested and happy to practice it. Also, teams around me were curious about it and I’ve run a few introductory sessions.

First of all, I will be honest with you with you… Refactoring Code Retreat is just more fancy name for a good old Legacy Code Retreat.

Why use different name? After the last internal Code Retreat we speculated that the “legacy” was a put off for some people, that would otherwise enjoy the event:

Legacy code during weekend? I see enough of that during the week!

So this time, we are changing the name, trying to make it more attractive ;)

Anyway, why should you attend? In my opinion, Legacy(Refactoring) Code Retreat is worth your time because: