Impact Mapping | Patrick Baumgartner

Feb 15, 2017 by Madalina Botez in  Announcements
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.

 

Patrick Baumgartner works as a Software Craftsman and passionate Agilista at 42talents. His biggest goal is to improve everyone’s workplace in IT. At #itakeunconf, he will run an Impact Mapping workshop.

 

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#1. Share with us 5 things from your experience that helped you grow & become the professional you are today

  • having a mentor who supports you is great and helps you to challenge your ideas and decisions
  • being curious helps you to continuously learn new things
  • teaching others helps you to get better on the topic and you learn how to explain things to others
  • meeting continuously new people to create new ideas and get inspiration
  • having enough rest so that your brain has time for recreation

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

[ctt template=”12″ link=”A831F” via=”no” ]With Impact Mapping you will learn an excellent strategic planning technique that helps you to look at your challenges from different angles[/ctt]
If someone wants to have something solved, he often has already a concrete idea in mind and tells you how to implement it.
With changing the focus and looking at the Why, Who, How and the What your final solution might be entirely different compared to the initial suggestion. You will realize that you can use this technique for nearly everything.

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

  • Learn from and with others, by getting involved in local / international practitioners communities. For example,  we run in Zurich a monthly Software Craftsmanship Meetup with very diverse topics
  • Attend conferences to get inspired by the talks and workshops, as well as the discussions with participants and other speakers.
  • Take time for yourself, relax, free your mind and new ideas and thoughts will pop up automatically!

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

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

Call for speakers open

Sep 04, 2014

door-open

We have opened the call for speakers. For next year we decided to keep the topics that you hold dear: architecture, design principles, TDD etc. and also add some new areas that are becoming more and more popular these days: mobile, big data, scaling architecture etc. Visit the page to learn more.

If you know somebody that has something valuable to share with our audience, we’d appreciate it if you shared the link for the call page.

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Have any questions about the call for papers or the unconference? Let us know in the comments.

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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.

 

Users, tests & TDD

Apr 08, 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. 

 

Thomas Sundberg, developer with more than 25 years of experience, has developed an obsession for technical excellence. This translates to software craftsmanship, clean code, test automation and continuous deployment. At I T.A.K.E Unconference, he will share more about continuous deployment, TDD, and testing.

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#1. Share top 5 things you did that helped you grow & become the professional you are today

The five things I am able to come up with now are:

  • Automation
  • Tidiness
  • Teaching
  • Speaking at conferences
  • Starting my own business

Automation

I have always found it fascinating to automate things.

One of my earliest experiences automating things was with my first PC where I made a boot floppy that booted the system and brought up a word processor. And it only took 1 minute or so. I didn’t really know if this was usable or not, but it was fun.

I wrote code that verified code back in 1997. A colleague of mine asked why. I thought that it was a good idea since I could. It wasn’t formalized like we do today with tools like JUnit, but it was code that verified code.

Automation has also led me to continuous integration back in 2004. This was the time when tools like Cruise Control wandered the earth. Probably hiding from dinosaurs.

Using Cruise Control, Ant and JUnit, I was able to implement continuous delivery at Gamefederation where I worked at the time. I didn’t know it back then, but that is what we call it today.

We had a build that took 20 minutes. It built the system, rebuilt the database, deployed the system and tested that it worked on a freshly setup database.

The testing was so thorough that the operations guy took the artifacts from passing builds and put them straight into production.

When I left Gamefederation, I was told that there had been times when the project manager had been thinking who he should give a task to. Should he give it to the guy leading the developers, we would say lead developer today, or to me. He concluded that if he gave it to the lead developer he would get something back in two hours and a NullPointerException. If he gave the task to me, he would get something back in two days and it would work. One of our differences was that I did unit testing and the lead developer didn’t.

Tidiness

I don’t like a mess. A kitchen sink with lots of unwashed dishes is awful. At the same time, I don’t mind some things being totally out of order. I don’t have to sort the toothpicks at a restaurant. A friend of mine, also into clean code, has told me that he sometimes does this.

The tidiness led me to Clean Code after watching Bob Martin at a keynote at Agile 2008 in Toronto. Hearing him talk about why we prefer clean code over crap was liberating. I bought his book and read it.

Clean code was among my earliest presentations.

 
Teaching

During an oral exam 1998, before we where even done, I was asked if I could help out as a teaching assistant in a database course. I said yes. This was a start for me where I learned that it is fun and rewarding to teach. Since then I have been working as a teacher and trainer on and off.
Speaking at conferences has enforced this urge to spread knowledge about things I think are important.
 
Speaking at conferences

Traveling to conferences has been a way to make new connections with people who care about the same things that I care about. That is, clean code, testing stuff, getting code into production and similar things.

I have met new personal friends this way. I have also made business with people I met at conferences.
 
Starting my own business

I became independent in 2013. This has given me a platform where I can strengthen my possibilities to spread the word about stuff that matters. Not just programming, but also doing it properly.

It took a while before I made the move. It was a scary decision to take. When I started there were a lot of things I was unsure of. Selling and finding assignments, taxes, book keeping just mentioning a few of them.

Running your own company is much more than just writing a few for loops and be done for the day. It is a lifestyle. But it is a lifestyle I enjoy.

 

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

I have two sessions at I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2016.

How deep are your tests? 

I will show how it is possible to test all paths through a system without using many integrated tests and that it isn’t possible to test all paths through almost any system using integrated tests.

I will also show that it is possible to test all paths using unit tests.

Using some mocking and stubbing in combination with actual unit tests is the way to do this. If we do this properly, we are able to check all paths through the application and will have very few integrated tests.

Definition of done: Working software in production! 

This is a case study where I will share how I implemented CD at one client. CD can mean, at least, two different things.

  • Continuous Delivery – the system is delivered for use continuously
  • Continuous Deployment – the system is deployed into production continuously

The way we did this was to create packages that were possible to install as the main artifact from our continuous integration build. The target was Red Hat servers so RPM packages where a good artifact.

Delivering these packages to a YUM repo allowed us to install them easily.

The last step was to trigger the installation. We used Puppet for provisioning our servers so all we had to do to automate the deployment after a new package was built was to trigger Puppet.

 

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

 

I am an amateur musician

I play the trombone in two orchestras: One show orchestra at Stockholm University- KÃ¥rsdraget and A big band – West Side Big Band. This means that I attend regular rehearsals twice a week and sometimes public gigs at dances or concerts.

Cat lover

I have two cats at home. Sune and Gretchen. They are both cats that we have gotten through an agency that helps homeless cats to new homes.

I write a lot

I have a personal goal to write a blog post each month. I wrote a Maven plugin for helping me with my writing. Most blog posts include source code and copying and posting code is error prone. Including part or complete files that compile is less error prone. This has helped me a lot. It fits quite well with my urge to automate things.

Downhill skiing

I had never seen a pair of skis close until I was over 30. Then I joined a few friends and went skiing for a week in France. The first day was horrible. I fell and hurt myself. But after a week with ski lessons I had understood some of the basics. Skiing is a favorite activity today.

 

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

Join I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016!

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