Behaviour Driven Development with Thomas Sundberg

Nov 26, 2014 by Madalina Botez in  Announcements

Thomas Sundberg is an independent consultant based in Stockholm, Sweden. He has a Masters degree in Computer Science from the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, in Stockholm. Thomas has been working as a developer for more than 20 years and has developed an obsession for technical excellence. This translates to Software Craftsmanship, Clean Code and Test Automation.

Cucumber JVM is a tool that allows development teams to describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated test and development-aid – all rolled into one format. Cucumber JVM enables the implementation of Behaviour Driven Development in an organization that uses JVM for development.

Enjoy his presentation @ I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2014 edition.

Check out more about I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015 or see directly the Schedule.

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

Feb 13, 2017
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)

 

 

 

ITAKE_2017

 

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

Register now for I T.A.K.E Unconference 2017!

Win an invitation to I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015

Mar 13, 2015

contest

The week to celebrate #famousITwomen brings you the chance to win an invitation to The Europe Software Craftsmanship event dedicated to Software Architecture, Software Design and Technical Strategy – I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015.

Most of our followers have probably found out more about the roots of technology from the #famousITwomen stories here on the blog. As a gift to you, here’s an invitation that you might enjoy – thanks for following us. There’s how you can get it:

Leave a comment hereby saying Who’s your favorite famous IT woman. Or share a link where to read more about her. She can be Ada Lovelace, or Barbara Liskov, or any of the women who left stamps on tech history, anyone that might have inspired you. Use the #famousITwomen hashtag.

You can enter the competition until Mon 16th of March. The one who has most likes for his/her comment will be rewarded on Wed 18th of March. If you are a software craftsman we encourage you to comment too and win the invitation for her.

Looking forward to see you at I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015 in May!

P.S. Keep an eye on the blog for amazing stories about #famousITwomen who’ve made breakthrough contributions along the history www.itakeunconf.com

Find more about I T.A.K.E. Unconference.

 

Powering Interactive Data Analysis with Google BigQuery

Mar 29, 2017
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.

 

Marton Kodok is a Senior Software Architect REEA, who led the implementation of complex and distributed systems. At #itakeunconf 2017, he will share more about Powering Interactive Data Analysis with Google BigQuery.

 

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#1. Please share with us 5 things you did that helped you grow & become the professional you are today

 

It all started when I was posting answers for the Stackoverflow community and the reputation started to grow over 100k. I realized that being a professional is a constant effort and never ending learning of new cool stuff. To be up to speed you need to constantly shift to emerging technologies. You see the merit when your answer voted and uncounted millions of people also learn.
We need to be open-minded and have a mentor around us to grow. As you might not have a mentor close to you in person, you can leverage online communities such as Stackoverflow, a community that helps you grow. It helped me.
Then when you take it offline and be supportive & active in local communities, participate in Startup Weekends, community projects you believe in – you will be able to work on fun stuff. Also being part of an IT company such as REEA, it helped me become a professional by all the great startup projects I had to work on, the colleagues, the clients, and also the conference participations.
In 2016, I was nominated and accepted into the Google Developers Experts program. Having my exemplary work recognized by the greatest company in the IT industry and pointing me as an expert and outstanding professional, it gives me new goals to achieve even more.

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

Nowadays there are dozens of options to choose how you architect your project for next level of data analytics. We will cover how Google BigQuery helps to solve the petabyte scale data warehousing, and ability to write complex queries for your dashboards.

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

My inspiration inbox is Feedly, there I consume all sorts of content I really enjoy reading: High Scalability, Percona Blogs, Codrops, Medium, SIMB.
ITAKE_2017

Want to join Marton and ~300 software crafters from around Europe?

Register now for I T.A.K.E Unconference 2017!

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