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.
Peter Hilton is a software developer, writer, speaker, trainer, and musician. Peter’s professional interests are business process management, web application development, functional design, agile software development, and documentation. He will present at #itakeunconf a session about documentation for software developers.
#1. Please share with us 5 things you did that helped you grow & become the professional you are today
The things that helped me grow the most were starting to do something that I later developed a lot further: travel, presenting, writing, management, and coding. These influences on my professional development were taking overseas assignments and later moving permanently to another country, presenting to colleagues and later at conferences, writing a tech blog and later a published book, leading a team and later taking on a management role. As for coding, the most important thing was to never-never give it up and always have something new to learn.
#2. What challenges will the participants find solutions to during your session at I T.A.K.E Unconference 2017?
My workshop will help participants address the hardest challenge in software documentation: learning how to take the first step from no documentation at all to the minimum viable documentation. The hard part is understanding what you can do, without wasting time on too much documentation.
#3. Recommend for the participants 3 sources you find inspiration from and would help them better understand you
iMy passion is figuring how to explain software and make it maintainable. I was originally inspired to learn more about this after reading Steve McConnel’s book Code Complete, as well as many other books about software development. I discuss my favourite aspect of making code understandable in my Software Engineering Radio interview on naming things.
I’ve always found talking to other people the best way to develop and refine my own ideas. This inevitably lead to conference presentations, for which my greatest influence is Kevlin Henney’s presentations.
Perhaps my greatest inspiration is the real world, which I enjoy exploring. My favourite way to learn about a new city and immerse myself in it is to explore its cafes, which I started doing on business trips and overseas assignments when I had a hotel room instead of a home to stay in. Writing cafe reviews on my own web site, before the likes of TripAdvisor was invented, was also how I started to explore writing. Today, there’s still probably as much writing about cafes as about programming on my own blog.
Want to join Peter and ~300 software crafters from around Europe?
Register now for I T.A.K.E Unconference 2017!
Test-Drive your Database & the 4 Rules of Simple Design
#1. SHARE TOP 5 THINGS YOU DID THAT HELPED YOU GROW & BECOME THE PROFESSIONAL YOU ARE TODAY
- Reading software development books hungrily in the first few years of my career. Texts such as Code Complete and especially The Pragmatic Programmer and Test-Driven Development by Example were hugely influential on my early career and the direction I chose to take. The Pragmatic Programmer in particular is worth re-reading: I didn’t fully understand some parts of it as a fresh graduate joining the industry, and the experience I’ve built up over the last ten years has allowed me to get more from it on each later reading.
- Attending developer meetups, user groups, and conferences. Aside from the knowledge gained from the talks and workshops run at these events, they’re an invaluable opportunity to meet other developers, learn from their experiences, and about the local software industry.
- Finding a good mentor. As it turned out, my mentoring was very unofficial: a former colleague of mine guided me in the ways of professional software development, and pointed me in the direction of books, blogs, and other resources to learn from. His advice was invaluable in helping me discover techniques for writing good tests (and why tests are important), the importance of refactoring, and the foundational principles of Object-Oriented Design, such as SOLID. All of this at the beginning of my career, in an environment where I wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to such topics.
- Understanding people as well as tech. As technical people, we can often be quite blinded to the problems around us and focus on the tools and technologies rather than the underlying collaborations with other people.
- Applying principles I’d learned elsewhere to my profession. I play a lot of music, and have been for over 20 years; as such, the idea of deliberate practice is quite a familiar one to me, and applying this principle to the techniques used in software development made a lot of sense. Participating in and organising things like Dojos and Code Retreats has helped me understand and improve my own development process enormously.
#2. WHAT CHALLENGES WILL THE PARTICIPANTS FIND SOLUTIONS TO DURING YOUR SESSIONS @ I T.A.K.E UNCONFERENCE 2016?
#3. WHAT ELSE WOULD YOU LIKE TO SHARE WITH PARTICIPANTS?
Want to join Alastair and many more software crafters from around Europe?
I T.A.K.E. Unconference Day 1 – Slides & Videos
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
Simon Brown: Software Architecture as Code
Hardcore Programming
Stefan Kanev: Clojure, ClojureScript and Why They’re Awesome
Ionut G. Stan: Let’s write a type checker + Code
Quality Practices
Igor Popov: Mutation Testing
Svetlana Mukhina: Metrics that bring value
Patroklos Papapetrou: Holding Down Your Technical Debt with SonarQube
Executable Specifications
Cyrille Martraire: Living Documentation Jumpstart
Developer’s Life
Andrew Hall: Power Up: Learn How to Recharge Your Energy Bar
Krasimir Tsonev: 7 Rules to Get the Things Done
Thomas Sundberg: The responsible Developer
Architecture
Tim Perry: Microservices and Web Components Are The Same Thing
Robert Mircea & Virgil Chereches: Our Journey to Continuous Delivery
DevOps
Andrei Petcu: Rocket vs Docker: Battle for the Linux Container
Alex 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.
Putting the Science in Computer Science with Felienne Hermans
Most conversations about best practices in software development focus on personal preferences: Vim versus emacs, static versus dynamic typing, Java versus C#. Other domains use research to settle such questions. Couldn’t software development benefit from science as well?
Felienne Hermans, assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, had a very engaging talk at I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2014 about experiments designed and run to answer questions such as:
- What is the best programming language?
- Do design patterns help in any way?
- Is Linus’ law correct?
- Are spreadsheets code?
Watch her talk @ I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2014 edition to find out the results.
Check out more about I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015 or see directly the Schedule.