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.
Thomas Coopman is an independent software engineer and consultant focused on the full stack: frontend, backend and mostly people, practices and processes. At #itakeunconf, in his hands-on session, the participants will be implementing projections based on an event stream we provide.
#1. Please share with us 5 things you did that helped you grow and become the professional you are today
I draw most of my inspiration from visiting and organizing events in the communities. Additionally, the Software Craftsmanship Slack Team is a great place to start discussing with craftspeople all over the world.
1) Experimenting with different career choices until it felt good
2) Exchanging experiences with fellow professionals by attending meetups, usergroups and conferences
3) Fighting the urge to assume I’m always right
4) Limiting the subjects I’m willing to learn and invest time in
5) Investing in my communication techniques. I’m continuously learning to speak non-techie. I’m practicing speaking in front of an audience.
#2. What challenges will the participants find solutions to during your session at I T.A.K.E Unconference 2017?
The ability to extract useful knowledge from a store of historical events.
#3. Recommend for the participants 3 sources you find inspiration from and would help them better understand you
1) The Software Craftsmanship and Testing community are awesome. Reach out to them.
2) Listen to any podcast or audiobook during your commute. It’s far better for your personal growth than listening to the (mostly bad) news on the radio. I particularly like these podcasts: Star Talk Radio and Hardcore History.
3) Pick up a musical instrument and learn to play it adequately. I tend to relax with a guitar in my hands or a piano at my fingertips.
Want to join Thomas and ~300 software crafters from around Europe?
Register now for I T.A.K.E Unconference 2017!
Mocks are mocking at you?
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.
Andreas Leidig, Developer & Agile Mentor MsgGillardon AG, and Robin Danziger, Software Developer, will join I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016 as speakers. They will share in their talk more about mocks and prototypical library for solving this problem in JavaScript: chadojs.
#1. SHARE TOP 5 THINGS YOU DID THAT HELPED YOU GROW & BECOME THE PROFESSIONAL YOU ARE TODAY
Robin:
- Regular participant and speaker at conferences & local user groups
- Coaching teams and organizing internal meetups about software development
- Working with different teams and companies (I’m a freelancer)
- Ask professionals how they would solve a problem
- Try to read the whole internet 😉
Andreas:
- Initiating a conference (SoCraTes)
- Visiting and speaking at conferences
- Listening and questioning my own views
- Working with different teams (during my previous job)
- Thinking outside the box
#2. What challenges will the participants find solutions to during your session at I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016?
Participants will learn about the possible pitfalls and gaps when using mock objects blindly. They will understand that this may lead to decreased safety for refactoring and this weakend trust initiates the need for creating more and more integration tests.
They will see the underlying principles and learn about ways and techniques to escape this trap.
3. What else would you like to share with participants
Robin:
I like to talk about different software development approaches. How can we use and maintain software tests from specifications and end-to-end-tests to unit-tests. And I would like to know how other teams share their knowledge and improve the collaboration inside the team.
Andreas:
Don’t be shy. Open your ears and eyes. Listen and ask.
Want to join Andreas & Robin and many more software crafters from around Europe?
Documentation for software developers
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?