This year I attended the IBM Rational Software Development Conference (RSDC) 2008 in Orlando, Florida. One can really see what is going on inside IBM Rational at the moment, and where the Rational world is turning to. There were 300+ sessions, divided into 14 (+ one executive summit) tracks. What I have taken back from this conference is:
- Teamwork (especially with the Jazz platform, in which IBM already invested $250 million)
- Process is dead, long live practices (as first advocated by Ivar Jacobson, and nowadays followed by IBM). This simply has to get its reflection within the RMC product.
- Agile, agile and again agile. All three meaning different levels of agility….
- Toyota and its quality are superb and often referred to
There were a lot of interesting speakers: Scott Ambler, Per Kroll, Ivar Jacobson, Grady Booch, Erich Gamma, Ian Spence, Kurt Bittner….
Slides
In 2007 IBM send the attendees a CD containing all presentation material. Too bad they are not going to do so this year. Every attendee has received a username / password which can be used to access the presentations via the web. This means you have no control whether the interesting presentation will still be there tomorrow. To solve this, I have come up with the following solution:
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Unzip the file attached to this blog
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Use Firefox, and install the plugin called 'Download them all'. This plugin allows you to download all referenced .zip files (amongst others) on a single webpage. Saves a lot of 'right click | Save as'.
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Go to the IBM RSDC 2008 website and download all the presentations from all the tracks.
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Unzip the presentations in the presentations directory (created by the zip file in step 1)
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Start the website by using either the 'index.html' or the 'agenda_by_speaker.html'.
Note: The aim was not to deliver a complete working website, but just one in which it was easier to identify the content of the presentations and allowing a quick link to the real presentation (and not another zip file).
Enjoy!