Crafted Design with Sandro Mancuso

Feb 19, 2015 by Madalina Botez in  Announcements

Sandro Mancuso, the initiator of the London Software Craftsmanship Community, wondered how to structure the code so that it reveals not only the architecture but also its features. In this talk, he shows how to better organize namespaces and domain entities, something he called Interaction Driven Design.

Enjoy his presentation @ I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2014 edition. Curious about 2015 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!

How to successfully manage remote teams

Apr 26, 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.

Hugo Messer, founder of Bridge Global, will join I T.A.K.E Unconference as speaker. In his workshop, the participants will learn more about how to successfully manage remote teams.

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

  • ​Starting my own software development firm, offering IT outsourcing
  • Focusing 10 years on growing the company and learning how to grow a company, manage IT projects and people
  • Always reading a lot of (management) books to keep educating myself
  • I attend conferences and trainings regularly
  • The last years I’ve invested in learning how to share my experience and knowledge with others through speaking and training

​

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

During the session they will find out more about:

  • ​common pitfalls within distributed teams > how to make distributed teams work
  • communicating across cultures, distance and timezones
  • how to apply agile to distributed teamwork

I’ve shared about the session in this video as well.

 

#3. What else would you like to share with participants

​I’m an entrepreneur and have worked in the software development world for over 10 years. I am a pragmatic person, most of what I learned was by doing it myself. I love starting and building companies and I also love figuring out ways to make things work better. I’m passionate about working with distributed teams, because I believe it enables people to work from anywhere, it enables companies to hire great people everywhere. I’ve seen that people struggle when working in distributed teams and I’ve created the ‘distributed agile path’​ to help people with this. I’ve also written 6 books about managing distributed teams.
I love reading books about management, entrepreneurship and spirituality. I also love the stuff of Tim Ferris. My hobbies are cooking, travel and playing with my kids.
logo ITAKE 2016

 

Want to join Hugo and many more software crafters from around Europe?

Join I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016!

I T.A.K.E. Unconference Day 1 – Slides & Videos

Jun 10, 2015

An unconference is as special as its participants. Thank you everyone – Speakers, Facilitators, Bumblebees & Butterflies for working all together, writing code, pairing, solving problems while discussing, listening and sharing knowledge.

After such an awesome gathering of practitioners, we are happy to share the presented slides.

Structured by tracks, find them all below.

I T.A.K.E. Unconference Day 1 – Slides & Videos

 

Keynote

simonbrown-squareSimon Brown: Software Architecture as Code


Hardcore Programming

stefan-kanevStefan Kanev: Clojure, ClojureScript and Why They’re Awesome

igstanIonut G. Stan: Let’s write a type checker + Code

Quality Practices 

Igor-PopovIgor Popov: Mutation Testing

MukhinaSvetlana Mukhina: Metrics that bring value

Patroklos-PapapetrouPatroklos Papapetrou: Holding Down Your Technical Debt with SonarQube

Executable Specifications 

Cyrille MartraireCyrille Martraire: Living Documentation Jumpstart

Developer’s Life

Andrew-HallAndrew Hall: Power Up: Learn How to Recharge Your Energy Bar

Krasimir-TsonevKrasimir Tsonev: 7 Rules to Get the Things Done

Thomas SundbergThomas Sundberg: The responsible Developer

Architecture

tim-perryTim Perry: Microservices and Web Components Are The Same Thing

robertIMG_2123Robert Mircea & Virgil Chereches: Our Journey to Continuous Delivery


DevOps

cegekaAndrei Petcu: Rocket vs Docker: Battle for the Linux Container

AlexAlex Bolboacă: Why you should start using Docker?

See also: Day 2 Slides & Videos

We hope to see you again at the next I T.A.K.E. Unconference edition.

The recorded videos are now being processed. Stay tuned.

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