My next appearance at a conference will be at the JAOO conference in Australia - specifically Brisbane and Sydney. This is JAOO's first venture into Australia and I have high hopes for it. One thing I've learned from my recent visits to our offices in Oz is that Australia really lacks for decent conferences. JAOO does an excellent job, so it should do well.

I have three talks on my list, two of which I'll be doing with my colleague Erik Dörnenburg.

The first one to mention is our tutorial on Test Driven Development. We've done this a couple of times in the past. It's a very informal tutorial - Erik codes up an example from scratch using TDD which we use as a vehicle to explaining how the process works. We show the basic red-green-refactor cycle, and go into the use of state and interaction based verification. It's very much an introductory tutorial, aimed at people who haven't done TDD before.

Our second effort will be a keynote: on Simplicity in Design. Erik is both a proponent and exponent of simple architectural designs, as shown by his work for The Guardian. The problem with simplicity is that it's a complicated subject to talk about, but I think we shall be able to give some useful principles to think about.

I'm very much looking forward to the keynote, as I've wanted to do a keynote with Erik for a long time. I really enjoy giving joint keynotes, and have managed to now with Neal, Dan, and Jim. Erik and I just haven't found a chance to team up together before.

My final talk is a solo. I'll be talking about patterns in enterprise software. With this talk about the role I see patterns playing in software design and talking about some of the more important patterns that I've written up.