Rebecca Wirfs-Brock: Maintaining Your Code Clint Eastwood Style

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock is the object design pioneer who invented the set of design practices known as Responsibility-Driven Design (RDD), the first behavioral approach to object design. She is the lead author of two software design books and design columnist for IEEE Software. By accident, she started the x-Driven Design meme (TDD, DDD, BDD…). Although best known for software design, she is has a passion simply expressing complex requirements and effectively communicating software architecture.
Rebecca shared with the audience how to maintain your code in the keynote address from the first edition of I T.A.K.E Unconference. Watch below her remarks!
Code. Craft. Learn. Share. Repeat. Call for Speakers for I T.A.K.E Unconference, 5th edition, is open! Apply here.

I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2018 Slides & Videos
You can check out this year’s videos here, on our Youtube Channel.
DAY 1
Alexandre Bauduin – Automation, Aviation Authorities and Mission Critical Software
Bart Szulc – Test Coverage 2.0
Lemi Orhan – Git Anti-Patterns
Johan Peeters & Michael Boeynaems – REST Identity and Access Management
Armagan Amcalar
- console.log(brain)
- http://github.com/dashersw/brain-bits
- http://github.com/dashersw/wits
- http://github.com/dashersw/brain-monitor
Alastair Smith – Check That: How a List Can Save Your Life
Philipp Krenn – NoSQL’s Fight for Security
DAY 2
Alexandru Bolboaca
Bart Szulc
- Finding Bugs Before Implementation – part I
- Finding Bugs Before Implementation – part II
Daniel Carral
- What is Good Code? Evaluating Code Quality – slides
- What is Good Code? Evaluating Code Quality – Github repository
David Voelkel
- Fake It Outside-In TDD Workshop – slides
- Fake It Outside-In TDD Workshop – illustrating screencasts
Alin Pandichi – Incremental Feature Development with Web Components
Henk Boelman
- Unleash Some AI into the Wild – slides
- Unleash Some AI into the Wild – Tendocare.ai video

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?

Show your coding skills while competing with peers like you
How the Programming Contest works?
- Register for THE contest on May 28
- Solve the challenges
- Submit the solutions until May 29, 2 pm