16 years of legacy code with mob programming and Lego | Joe Wright

Feb 13, 2017 by Madalina Botez in Announcements

Enjoy the following series of interviews with the speakers, top-notch software crafters from across Europe, joining I T.A.K.E Unconference, Bucharest, 11-12 May. Discover the lessons learned and what drives them to challenge the known path in their field.

Joe Wright, Senior Developer, Coach & Architect, helps people deliver software that’s well designed, fully tested and released early. You will learn from his case study at #itakeunconf about how a team can go from individuals to a mob.

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#1. Share with us 5 things from your experience that helped you grow & become the professional you are today

# Make time for deep work

Set a few hour blocks aside each week that you will dedicate to improving yourself or creating something each week. As a parent, I’ve had to start doing this by getting up early to grab two hours each day. During this time you can learn a skill, practice coding, write a book or make a podcast. It’s far too easy to let distractions rule your life. Make time to do something you are proud of.

# Become a facilitator

I think everyone is terrified of public speaking. It’s an unnatural thing to do. Our ancestors learned this behavior as a survival instinct – if lots of carnivores are looking at you then you are probably the dinner. Time to run.

Getting over this is an important step that enables you to have all sorts of life experiences. Speaking at conferences, leading workshops and meeting interesting new people. The way I beat the fear was by volunteering to co-organise a well-attended meetup. Each month I would have to get up in front of a room of my peers and say some boilerplate about welcome and the agenda. But just that act of getting up and speaking was enough to dull the fear over time. I’ve not been made into dinner yet.

As well as building yourself up as a speaker, it helps improve your network of people. People like speaking to the host at an event and it gives you an easy opportunity to learn about those people, then take a mental note when you might want to get into contact with them in the future.

# Ask for help

Don’t feel you have to figure everything out yourself or read up online. Reach out and ask people for help.

As you spend more time in your career you meet more people – and one day you’ll have a question you’d love to ask them. It’s even easier now with social media and video conferencing. People will give you 30 minutes of time online or meet you over coffee to give you their advice if they think you’ve got an interesting question to answer.

I always have a list of three things I want advice on. You never know who you are going to meet.

# Improve in more than one dimension

At first, newly minted developers want to get projects released and in users hands. During this, you try to get better at creating software that can be changed to meet their needs. Eventually, newer technology comes out, which promises to solve the problem of getting code out quicker and is easier to change.

It’s quite easy to fall into the trap of just learning technology stacks. This can be rewarding, but that’s not the only way to improve as a developer and meet people’s needs.

Seek out opportunities to see the world from the other functions in software. If you tester goes on holiday then volunteer to stand in for them. If you have an ops team then ask to pair on making the release process smoother. Facilitate a retrospective for another team. Run a usability session with real world users to see how your product is used. Stepping into another roles shoes helps build empathy, which will allow you to work better with others people in the future.

If you tech stack isn’t challenging you then concentrate on improving your “soft skills”. Teach someone how it works. Figure out ways to promote and resolve conflict on your team. Fix the root causes of communication and process issues that slow you down.

# Find people that will challenge you

It can be hard to get feedback about how you are doing. Are your ideas valid? Often you can’t get this feedback in your workplace. Seek out a group of people or a person that is willing to challenge how you think.

For me, this is the Lean Agile space and my local code craftsmanship group.

Consider these people that challenge you your core group. The way you work should be consistent with the ideals of that group. So don’t ever worry about saying what you think at work, just make sure you stay true to the principles of your core group.

#2. What challenges will the participants find solutions to during your session at I T.A.K.E Unconference 2017?

How can I reduce communication, approval, and tech debt issues from slowing down my team?
How can I measure and improve how a dev team spends their time?
How can I get started doing this at my work?

#3. Recommend for the participants 3 sources you find inspiration from and would help them better understand you

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport (book)
Facilitation advice – available here
The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox (book)

Want to join Joe, +30 international speakers and ~300 software crafters from around Europe?

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock: Maintaining Your Code Clint Eastwood Style

Dec 01, 2016

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock is the object design pioneer who invented the set of design practices known as Responsibility-Driven Design (RDD), the first behavioral approach to object design. She is the lead author of two software design books and design columnist for IEEE Software. By accident, she started the x-Driven Design meme (TDD, DDD, BDD…). Although best known for software design, she is has a passion simply expressing complex requirements and effectively communicating software architecture.

Rebecca shared with the audience how to maintain your code in the keynote address from the first edition of I T.A.K.E Unconference. Watch below her remarks!

Code. Craft. Learn. Share. Repeat. Call for Speakers for I T.A.K.E Unconference, 5th edition, is open! Apply here.

Meet the speakers – Part 2. Super early bird tickets available!

Mar 03, 2016

Software craftsmen from more than 15 countries will meet in the heart of Bucharest, 19-20 May, at I T.A.K.E Unconference! For 2 days, almost 30 speakers will share insights, latest trends, and deliver hands-on sessions.

We have previously shared the first round of practitioners who will make this year event a one not to be missed. Below, you can read more about the next 5:

Franziska Sauerwein, Software Craftswoman at Codurance LTD, UK

Introduction to Outside In Test Driven Development (London School) (Live coding)

Learn about different styles of TDD and how to choose the appropriate one

Raising The Bar (Talk)

My Journey Towards Software Craftsmanship

Philipp Krenn, Tamer of technology at ecosio, Austria

Automate all the things AWS with Ansible (Workshop)

You want to automate your AWS infrastructure, the provisioning of instances, and your deployments? Then Ansible is the right tool for you and this workshop gets you up and running in no time

Tugberk Ugurlu, Software Developer at Redgate Software, UK

How Docker Changes the Way You Work with and Release Your Microservices (Talk)

1000 feet overview of managing a solution architecture that consists of Microservices with Docker

Zero Downtime Deployment Golden Rules (Talk)

Getting Into the Zero Downtime Deployment World

Tim Perry, Tech lead and Open-Source Champion at Softwire, Spain

Microservice Pipeline Architecture (Talk)

Microservice architecture in practice, to build content pipelines

Andrey Adamovich, Software Architect at Aestas IT, Latvia

Patterns for infrastructure as-a-code (Talk)

Patterns are everywhere

Visualizing codebases (Talk)

Want to challenge the current programming practices as these software craftsmen are doing? Want to experience new techniques, debate on the existing ones or even pair program in the I T.A.K.E Unconference space?

Get your Super Early Bird ticket today!

Stay tuned. We will continue publishing more about the program, speakers and the dynamic learning practices awaiting you.

Thrilled to see you in May!

Mocks are mocking at you?

Apr 13, 2016

Enjoy the following series of interviews with the speakers, top-notch software crafters from across Europe, joining I T.A.K.E Unconference, Bucharest, 19-20 May. Discover the lessons learned and what drives them to challenge the known path in their field.

Andreas Leidig, Developer & Agile Mentor MsgGillardon AG, and Robin Danziger, Software Developer, will join I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016 as speakers. They will share in their talk more about mocks and prototypical library for solving this problem in JavaScript: chadojs.

#1. SHARE TOP 5 THINGS YOU DID THAT HELPED YOU GROW & BECOME THE PROFESSIONAL YOU ARE TODAY

Robin:

Regular participant and speaker at conferences & local user groups
Coaching teams and organizing internal meetups about software development
Working with different teams and companies (I’m a freelancer)
Ask professionals how they would solve a problem
Try to read the whole internet 😉

Andreas:

Initiating a conference (SoCraTes)
Visiting and speaking at conferences
Listening and questioning my own views
Working with different teams (during my previous job)
Thinking outside the box

#2. What challenges will the participants find solutions to during your session at I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016?

Participants will learn about the possible pitfalls and gaps when using mock objects blindly. They will understand that this may lead to decreased safety for refactoring and this weakend trust initiates the need for creating more and more integration tests.
They will see the underlying principles and learn about ways and techniques to escape this trap.

3. What else would you like to share with participants

Robin:
I like to talk about different software development approaches. How can we use and maintain software tests from specifications and end-to-end-tests to unit-tests. And I would like to know how other teams share their knowledge and improve the collaboration inside the team.

Andreas:
Don’t be shy. Open your ears and eyes. Listen and ask.

Want to join Andreas & Robin and many more software crafters from around Europe?

Join I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016!