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.
Ricardo J. Mendez, founder at Numergent, is a software developer with 20 years of practice. He will share in his talk at I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016 more about immutable data.
#1. SHARE TOP 5 THINGS YOU DID THAT HELPED YOU GROW & BECOME THE PROFESSIONAL YOU ARE TODAY
Starting my own business, leaving the comfort of a company where you get a certain sense of security by deriving a regular salary, and having to deal with the hidden iceberg of new skills I had to learn but hadn’t realized I didn’t even know about.
Joining my first start up, which wasn’t the same as a usual job, nor with the degree of control of just running my own business, was a great learning experience on how to deal with uncertainty while still aiming to provide a measure of direction.
Realizing that, as a developer, your job is not to deliver code. Your job is to keep the user happy, and delivering code is only a part of that. It requires a mental shift from the technology-focused mentality one tends to have as an engineer.
Working with distributed teams, and learning to adapt to the different work and communication styles of people from different countries, has made a huge difference in adaptability, and has taught me to not assume the message is always getting across.
Going through several technology trends and epochs, seeing language and platform flame wars rage and abate, trying a bit of everything, helps come to grips with the idea that a language or a platform is just a tool, and it’s what you do with it that matters.
#2. What challenges will the participants find solutions to during your session at I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016?
The idea that being unable to modify your data can bring more flexibility is unintuitive.
However, the bigger our codebases grow, the harder it becomes to find out if a refactoring process, or even a seemingly small change, will have a negative impact. Test suites can reduce this uncertainty, but normally only inform us of a problem *after* we’ve made a change. There’s usually no way to know, in advance, how time consuming the side effects of a modification will be.
A shift in mentality towards data immutability, whatever the language we are using, will help structure the code and functionality in a way that makes it easier to grow and change down the road.
#3. What else would you like to share with participants ?
I assemble and lead project-specific teams to tackle challenges involving interaction design, data and open source. I’ve been working on software for over 20 years, across multiple industries – from desktop tools, to banking and financial institutions, to healthcare, to gaming.
I usually work with distributed teams, as I’d rather take the expertise where I find it than expect it to be around the corner, and it leads to interesting, varied teams with different perspectives.
A voracious reader, of both technical and non-technical books, it would be strange to find me without one or two tomes in progress. This extends to platforms and languages – I very much enjoy kicking the tires on both, always looking for something new to learn.
Want to join Ricardo and many more software crafters from around Europe?Join I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016!
Powering Interactive Data Analysis with Google BigQuery
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.
#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.
Want to join Marton and ~300 software crafters from around Europe?
Register now for I T.A.K.E Unconference 2017!
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.
16 years of legacy code with mob programming and Lego | Joe Wright
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.
#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?
Register now for I T.A.K.E Unconference 2017!