José gave a lightening talk on the things he had learnt in Houston. This included interesting things like how to adjust the air conditioning in the dorm rooms using a screw driver and the fact that the city seemed to be teeming with cockroaches. I learnt a couple of things too. On the first day I managed to get bites on both my feet. It was pointed out to me that I shouldn’t wear open toed sandals in Houston. I managed to get mosquito bites and something else that I was told was probably a chigger bite. I hadn’t even heard of chiggers.

I was also able to get some advice on coping with heat and humidity. And I did meet one woman at the airport who had lived in Japan and continued carrying a parasol now she was living in Houston again. Though the picture below of Norwin and Marty shows why men shouldn’t carry one of these no matter how hot it is.

Having just come back from YAPC::NA I thought I would write up some of my observations on the difference between this conference and the European ones I’ve attended over the past few years. I haven’t been to an American YAPC since 2001 in Montreal.

1. They had a pre-conference dinner

This surprised me as I thought that the last thing the organisers of the conference wanted to do the night before was to go out and eat Mexican food. I did enjoy this. Well, the only part I didn’t enjoy was the strange singing Mexican who wailed a love song into my ear after dinner – but it was certainly a different experience.

2. They didn’t name the rooms after any of the sponsors

I’m not really sure why they didn’t do this as I know that they did have some really good support from sponsors. Maybe they thought it would make it harder for people to find the various rooms or maybe it just didn’t occur to them that this could be something that the sponsors might like.

3. The conference bag didn’t contain a pen or paper

I suppose I’m still old fashioned as I like to write things down during the conference. If I make notes using my laptop I can become distracted and end up reading my email instead of listening to the talk.

4. They didn’t print conference proceedings

There was a booklet produced that contained location information, the schedule, sponsor information and talk abstracts but this didn’t contain the same level of detail that the European ones do. Having been involved in organising a YAPC I know that getting slides or papers in advance from speakers is very difficult and that it is also quite expensive to have these printed out. I didn’t miss these.

5. The auction was held during the conference dinner

I really liked this. It made the auction much more relaxed and also it didn’t seem to run as long at the European ones. The only disadvantage I could see was that it was easier to just sit and chat and ignore the auction.

6. They held a silent auction

One of the dullest things about the European auction is the selling of multiple copies of books and t-shirts. At the American conference a lot of these items were sold during the dinner via a silent auction. This still seemed to raise quite a bit of money and no-one had to sit through the tedium that usually goes along with this.

7. They held a “Town Hall” at the end of the conference

This was a meeting that allowed attendees to ask questions of the conference organisers and The Perl Foundation. I didn’t really like this as it didn’t end the conference on a positive note. The meeting went on for quite some time and people just started to drift away. I left before the end as I became much too cold in the air conditioned room.

8. They had a job fair

I know that in Birmingham last year that they had an expo / job fair but I haven’t quite gotten used to this idea yet. I did spend some time chatting to the various companies at the job fair as I was curious about their use of Perl even though I wouldn’t really be a suitable job candidate for them.

9. They didn’t announce the venue of the next conference.

At the end of a European YAPC they announce where the next conference is going to be held. This is a really positive way to end a conference and I thought it was a pity that they didn’t do this in America – though I don’t believe that the next venue has been chosen yet.

When I see one of my friends on their birthday I usually ask them if they feel 1 year older. Today, I feel 1 year older than yesterday. It took me 23 hours from when I left the hotel in Houston on Friday to finally arrive at my apartment at 11pm last night. I’m stiff and sore and wish that I had managed to stay asleep for longer. Marty is fast asleep. I did consider waking him as he’s planned some sort of birthday breakfast but he looked much too peaceful.

I was reading a paper [pdf] by Valentine Casey and Ita Richardson in which they list some of the lessons they learned from observing two virtual teams. One of the things they noticed was that the team members used email to publicly attack their colleagues. When I first read this I thought of all the problems you get on mailing lists when team members say negative or nasty things about each other. But they were actually talking about the problem of cc’ing. They observed that team members would copy in management on trivial matters when they wanted to put blame on someone who was in another geographic location. This practice not only alienated the person who got sent the message but also annoyed all the other team members in the same geographical location as the recipient. To make things worse the managers then got involved in things that really didn’t require management input and they also tended to take sides with the people who were in the same location as them.

I have come across this problem before but it was in the context of teams with competing priorities. For example the marketing team have a new campaign that they want to get out by a certain date but the programmers don’t have the time to code it. So, the marketing team start to cc their manager when writing to the developers in the hope that this will somehow help to make the developers find the time to do it or at least provide a good excuse for the missed deadline. And then the developers cc in their managers and before you know it the whole company is involved.

But I hadn’t thought about it in the context of virtual teams. I suppose I was thinking that virtual teams would have one manager. However, after thinking about this a bit more, I realise that the team may have one project manager but each team member may have to report to a manager in their own location. The paper suggests using a documented email policy to get round these problems but I suppose I don’t really like the thought of this. This is probably because I usually work with pedantic programmers who enjoy finding unexpected ways to manipulate a policy.

I’m finding it very hard to cope with the heat. It’s making me tired, grouchy and uncomfortable. It’s been about 33 degrees celsius today but the high levels of humidity mean that my body thinks it’s quite a bit hotter than that. I’ve never lived in a country before where I needed to pay attention to the heat index but I’m going to need to here. I’m trying to drink enough but I still occasionally get a headache that’s probably related to dehydration.

Yesterday afternoon I fell asleep whilst working on my talk for YAPC::NA and today I’m finding it hard to concentrate on anything. I should go shopping but I really don’t want to go outside.

On the plus side I’ll probably cope with the weather much better than I had expected to at next week’s conference as Tokyo is every bit as hot as Houston.

I went to hear Dave Thomas speak recently. He spoke for around 2 hours but I was really struck by his comments on cargo culting.  Extreme Programming (XP) was developed to overcome the problem with cargo culting methodologies yet it’s now being cargo culted. I hadn’t really thought about before this but I have heard people dismiss XP because they can’t faithfully follow one component. I have also had fellow programmers tell me it just doesn’t work because they’ve been forced to faithfully follow a set of rules laid out in one of the many XP books.

Dave clearly stated that the point of XP is to allow you to be agile and that if something in the 12 principles doesn’t work for you then modify it so that it does. The important thing is not his, Kent Beck’s or anyone’s recipes for making a project work but understanding the reasons behind XP.

As an example he mentioned the XP principle of having an on-site customer. Is this really practical? Having an on-site customer clearly shows how important it is to have the customer’s input on a project but when this is not possible there are other ways to make sure that the customer is committed and available to answer questions. Virtual teams are also problematic as you won’t even have the programmers in the same room as each other. But that doesn’t mean that a virtual team can’t be agile.

The Agile Manifesto states that we should value “responding to change over following a plan“. This principle should also be applied to our agile methodologies.

It’s surprising how quickly you can get used to being in a new place. I no longer find the food and drink selection in the supermarket that strange and I expect there to be vending machines on every other street corner. But I’ve had visitors for the past week or so and they have helped me see again just how foreign some of the things here are.

The new drink in our local supermarket is Pepsi Iced Cucumber. Who would want to drink that? Norwin decided that we all did and bought some. Mind you he poured it into shot glasses which gives a good indication of how much he expected anyone to like it. It tastes strange. I think it’s supposed to taste of cola and cucumber but I thought it tasted a bit like melon with a strange green watery cucumber aftertaste. Apart from the novelty factor I really wouldn’t recommend it though I might have fun serving it to unsuspecting guests in the future.

In the local supermarket they like you to give them change if you have it. Today my bill came to 3,109 yen. They have a tray that you set your notes in and I put down a 5,000 yen note. They then wait till you try to find coins to make up the 109. I hoked about in my purse and was able to come with 110 yen (a 100 and a 10 piece) or 107 (a 100, a 5, and 2 1s). As the 107 wasn’t very useful I put 110 on the tray. The shop assistant looked at it and started to point at my purse. I quickly looked at the till to make sure I had understood how much the shopping was – which I had. I then looked at the purse as I thought that maybe she could see 2 single yen pieces that would allow me to make up 109. At this point I became aware of the queue building up behind me. It always takes me longer to find coins than the Japanese as I still get these mixed up.

I started to look in my purse again but I just couldn’t come up with a better amount of change to give her. I looked at the assistant and told her that I didn’t have 9 yen. But she kept pointing and talking. Just when it was getting to the stage when I was going to hand my purse to her I realised that she was pointing at the pieces of paper in my purse. I know I shouldn’t keep paper in the coin part of my purse but sometimes, when I’m shopping in that supermarket, they give me these green coupon like things with my change. I usually just shove these into my purse as I want to move my shopping out of the way of the next person. I’ve never known what these are for. They have a number written on them and then lots of writing that I can’t read. I did ask Marty at one point but he didn’t have a clue either. I found out today. These are coupons that give me money off my shopping. So while I was frantically trying to find change in my purse the assistant was trying to tell me that I had coupons worth 150 yen in my purse.

I’m going to have to see what I did with the rest of them as I think they’ve been giving me these since January.

I was reading a paper today by Emmeline de Pillis and Kimberly Furumo that considered the hypothesis that men are more likely to be “deadbeats” on a virtual team than women. Deadbeats are described a “free riders” – people who are content to take credit for a group effort without doing any work.

They carried out an experiment with 201 people who were randomly assigned to either a face-to-face or virtual team of three people. They were trying to show that virtual teams have less cohesion than face-to-face teams and also that virtual teams have a higher percentage of non-contributing members (these were described as either deserters or deadbeats). Their results did show that there is less cohesion, less satisfaction, more time spent on a task, and more deadbeats within a virtual team. Most of the deadbeats were male but their results didn’t have statistical significance. The only deserters were male but again this didn’t have statistical significance.

I was aware that most studies show less cohesion in new virtual teams but I hadn’t really thought about gender issues. I’m going to have to read more papers on this area because Pillis and Furumo believe that virtual work is a particularly poor fit for the average male student. This concerns me. Most of the virtual teams I’m aware of are in the I.T. industry and they are predominately male. I want to know what it is about men that makes it harder for them to work in this environment and what can be done to improve their experience.

Things had been quite quiet here for the past couple of weeks but that’s all changed. I’ve been busy getting the apartment ready for our first guests. They arrived yesterday evening and managed to get up bright and early this morning to go to DisneySea.

Marty and I spent the weekend in Nagahama and had a great time catching up with Simon. Tomorrow I’m going to go and hear Dave Thomas speak. I’m also planning on travelling to Hiroshima and to spend some time showing my friends around Tokyo. It’s going to be fun.