Arjen kindly pointed out the other day that InfoQ has published the video and slides from my QCon London 2009 session with my colleague Stewart. I take full responsibility for my choice of shirt.

It was a great experience to spend three days doing nothing but listening to incredibly smart people talk about the things they’re passionate about in software. In fact, it was positively luxurious, and it really fired Stewart and I up to start getting a fresh current of ideas into our everyday work. I left wanting to learn Erlang immediately (Joe’s talk was a particular treat), to have my systems continuously available, to base everything on a web architecture, to do JIT architecture and, oh, everything all at once, even if the enthusiasms were mutually incompatible (write it all in Scala! AND Erlang! and Ruby!).

Of course, a set of unstructured enthusiasms does not a plan of action or a coherent system make. But all those sessions felt like a set of design patterns for approaches, rather than for software problems – and that’s a useful resource for anyone in any business.

If you’re experiencing a burning desire to see me in the flesh, I’ll be at QCon London on the Thursday talking about BA.com’s architecture and some issues and possible solutions we’ve explored or are still looking at.

I have a sneaking feeling that being surrounded by all those clever people is going to make me feel woefully simple….

Placeholder is one of my least favourite terms, not least because, in code, it has a tendency to mean both “permanent feature” and “oh, I’ll do it properly later”.

By all means do it the simplest way possible — in fact, we’ll have words if you don’t — but please don’t abandon your professional self-respect: it’s the placeholder stuff that will haunt you at 2am in three years’ time, not the polished production code you slaved over for three days to refactor into shining elegance.

I should know. Not only have I written my share of placeholder code… but an article called “placeholder” is just asking for trouble.