Want to join Karina and ~300 software crafters from around Europe?
Register now for I T.A.K.E Unconference 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.
Karina Popova, Head of Development at Link Mobility, as been working as DevOps Lead last 10 years. At #itakeunconf she will include in her talk a lot of real working IoT use cases and their potential impact of a combination IoT with AI.
#1. Please share with us 5 things you did that helped you grow & become the professional you are today
The five most important thing for my growth includes:
1. Education, I have spent almost 20 years studying and it was a key point in my professional growth.
2. Travelling, meeting people with different culture and observing their solutions.
3. Reading, especially biographies, as history always repeats.
4. Community contribution, to share and to experience diversity of different skills
5. Attending IT events, to learn the basics of new technologies, keep track of trends and have an awesome deep conversations
#2. What challenges will the participants find solutions to during your session at I T.A.K.E Unconference 2017?
Attendees will learn what is the potential impact of AI in the IoT sphere, what real IoT use cases with AI on top have been already implemented and how can we increase the quality of life with the AI+IoT.
#3. Recommend for the participants 3 sources you find inspiration from and would help them better understand you
Three most important sources for inspiration before my talk are the book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, the movie “Bicentennial Man” and my Instagram.
I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016 – Ist day videos & slides
The first day of I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016 was a great success: 18 speakers from 8 different countries shared insights and latest trends on 5 different stages.
Live coding sessions, the talks & workshops received an excellent feedback. Also, everyone got involved during the Open Space, Lightning Talks, Product Development Track & Kata Lounge. In the evening, the event continued informally at Dinner & Coding with a stranger.
You can watch the videos from the event here. Find below the slides from day one. Slides from day 2 are here.
Developer’s Life
Franziska Sauwerwin – Raising the Bar
Houssam Fakih & Borris Gonnot – Metrics for Good Developers
Claudia Rosu – Developer experience to Testing
Alastair Smith – Express Yourself!
Monica Obogeanu – How We Use BDD to Keep our Developers Smiling
Software Design
Ionut G. Stan – Let’s write a Parser!
Microservices
Tim Perry – Microservice Pipeline Architecture
Yegor Bugayenko – Microservices as Chat Bots
Cristiana Voicu & Cristian Andrei – Openstack in the Enterprise and you get your money from it
Condoiu Iuliana – Microservices-what tools do we use
Continous Deployment
Philipp Krenn – Automate all things AWS with Ansible
DevOps
Phillipp Krenn – Painfree object-document mapping with Elasticresearch
Autotesting & Design
Nicolas Frankel – Mutation Testing to the rescue of your tests
Alastair Smith – Test-Driving Your Database
Andreas Leidig & Robin Danzinger – Who is testing the mocks
A few thoughts from the participants
- First of all, I want to congratulate you for the organisation (…) You can be proud of your work. I spent an amazing time and the return on the invested time is 5/5
- Open talks were excellent for networking and ideas exchange
- The Product Development track was a useful and pleasant experience
Programming contest @I T.A.K.E Unconference
As for every I TAKE Unconference edition, we want to give a chance to the software crafters from the audience to showcase their skills and learn more in the process. And because we appreciate passion, we offer a prize to those who convince a jury of well-known international developers that they are the most skilled in the room.
This contest is not meant to be easy. It will require you to practice beforehand, so please read the instructions carefully.
It will also require you to register before the event.
Mechanics
- IMPORTANT: Register to the contest latest one day before I TAKE Unconference by sending an email to steliana.moraru@mozaicworks.com
- On the first day of the event, after lunch, you have max 15′ to do a performing kata in front of the jury.
- The winner will be announced at the end of the second day
Constraints
To simplify the jury’s decision, the performing kata has to conform to the following constraints:
- Only the following programming languages are accepted: Java, C, C++, C#, Python, Visual Basic .NET, PHP, Javascript, Swift or Ruby
- Only solo contestants are accepted. Sorry, no pair programming this time
- The kata has to showcase refactoring skills.
- The kata has to last max. 15′
How we will judge
The jury will judge your refactoring skills.
The ideal kata looks like this – you will get maximum point if you:
- clearly state the smells you see in the code
- pick one of the smells
- clearly state your plan to fix the smell
- fix it in small, safe steps
- run tests after each step to prove you didn’t break anything
- commit after each step with a clear message explaining why you made the change
- fix as many smells as possible within the time constraint
You will loose points if you:
- make big or unsafe changes to the code
- break the behaviour after changing the code
- don’t improve the code a lot
- don’t improve the design by the end of the kata (hint: we judge design using SOLID principles and the four elements of simple design)
Recommendations
To help you, we’ve thought out what we would do if we participated to such a contest. Here’s what we recommend.
1) Use one of the following codebases for the kata:
- https://github.com/emilybache/GildedRose-Refactoring-Kata
- https://github.com/emilybache/Tennis-Refactoring-Kata
- https://github.com/emilybache/Yatzy-Refactoring-Kata
- https://github.com/emilybache/Parrot-Refactoring-Kata
2) Practice beforehand on the structure we presented for the ideal kata. Ideally find someone to practice with.
3) Watch other people refactoring. YouTube has many videos on the topic, including using the recommended code bases.
Glossary
A programming kata is a repeatable exercise used to practice specific skills.
Performing kata means doing a kata in front of an audience.
Refactoring means changing the internal structure of the code without changing its behaviour.
Show your coding skills while competing with peers like you
Do you know how to test systems? Can you point coding issues? Are you open to learning from other people? And, best of all, can you safely clean up existing code and improve its design? These are all core developer skills nowadays, and you’ll greatly benefit from mastering them. Here’s just one more opportunity to do so during I T.A.K.E. Unconference – The Programming Contest. We think you’re going to enjoy it.
Take a set of challenges that will put your skills to the test, overcome them and get the most points to win the contest. Oh, we almost forgot: those getting the most points win gadgets like a drone or an iPad. They are still small rewards compared to the learning, but we’re sure they help :).
How the Programming Contest works?
Well, this is simple. We try to automate the process as much as possible. For the moment the instructions are as simple as:
- Register for THE contest on May 28
- Solve the challenges
- Submit the solutions until May 29, 2 pm
Really cool: you can use ANY of the following programming languages: Java, C#, PHP, C++.
Who will review your code?
The Jury is built of Software Craftsman Fellows from Europe – names soon to be announced. They will grade each challenge you took. There will be just a few challenges, and taking all of them may lead you to the highest score. So the more you solve the closer to win.
Compete with passionate coders at I T.A.K.E. Unconference
Join the crew, compete with developers like you, gain recognition and take the drone home, offered by Mozaic Works. Or the iPad offered by Accenture.
Don’t miss the Programming Contest as well as many other hands-on sessions at I T.A.K.E. Unconference happening in Bucharest on 28-29 May 2015.
