How we did it: The Story of a Website with Andreas Leidig

Nov 26, 2014 by Madalina Botez in Announcements

Andreas Leidig has broad experience in object oriented software development and agile practices. He started programming years ago with Smalltalk and worked as an agile coach for a few years. Nowadays he is working full-time in developing enterprise software products.

His talk is about how to set up a community project through a professional use of state-of-the-art technologies and collaboration methods: node.js, continuous integration, github, javascript, evolving design, noSql, testing, software craftsmanship, XP. A fly through the architecture, design and specific aspects of their product.

Enjoy his presentation @ I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2014 edition.

Check out more about I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015 or see directly the Schedule.

Meet the speakers – Part 3

Mar 07, 2016

Software craftsmen from more than 15 countries will meet in the heart of Bucharest, 19-20 May, at I T.A.K.E Unconference! For 2 days, around 30 speakers will share insights, latest trends, and deliver hands-on sessions.

In Meet the Speakers Part I and Part II, we shared more about the first 10 speakers who will make this year event a one not to be missed. Below, you can read more about the next 5:

Yegor Buhayenko, CTO at Teamed.io, USA

Talk To Your Microservice Via a Chat Bot, not UI (Talk)

It seems that chat bots are a more effective way of interaction between web (micro-)services and users than traditional HTML user interfaces.

Alexandru Badiu, Development Lead at Corbis, Romania

Maintaining a Node.JS OSS package (Live coding)

How to setup a development pipeline for your Node.JS project.

Hugo Meeser, Owner at Bridge Global, Netherlands

How to successfully manage remote teams (Workshop)

Participants will create a best practice board in teams of 5-6 people.

Ionut G. Stan, Software Developer at Eloquentix, Romania

Let’s Write a Parser! (Live coding)

One weird trick to write parsers. Compiler engineers will hate you!

Milen Dyankov, Senior Consultant at Liferay, Poland

Microservices and Modularity or the difference between treatment and cure! (Live coding)

An attempt to analyze the problems microservices claim to solve and explore other possible solutions!

Want to challenge the current programming practices as these software craftsmen are doing? Want to experience new techniques, debate on the existing ones or even pair program in the I T.A.K.E Unconference space?

Get your Super Early Bird ticket today!

Stay tuned. We will continue publishing more about the program, speakers and the dynamic learning practices awaiting you.

Thrilled to see you in May!

Immutable data

May 05, 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.

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!

Mutation testing

Apr 28, 2016

Nicolas Fränkel, Software Architect with 15 years of experience in a wide range of contexts, University teacher, experienced trainer and book author will join as speaker I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016. In his talk, he will explain how Code Coverage is computed and what its inherent flaw is. Afterwards, he will describe how Mutation Testing works and how it helps pointing out code that is tested but leave out corner cases.

#1. SHARE TOP 3 THINGS YOU DID THAT HELPED YOU GROW & BECOME THE PROFESSIONAL YOU ARE TODAY

I chose to become a programmer, because during my architectural studies, there was a course on POV-Ray, a ray-tracing software where scenes are described with a language
I now avoid not well-understood bash commands after trying to execute a find with exec rm command on a production server and starting deleting the server’s filesystem
I value knowledge sharing since I started teaching a very long time ago

#2. WHAT CHALLENGES WILL THE PARTICIPANTS FIND SOLUTIONS TO DURING YOUR SESSIONS @ I T.A.K.E UNCONFERENCE 2016?

During my talk, Mutation testing to the rescue of your tests, I will not provide a solution but challenge attendees beliefs. Code coverage is the most talked about metric when we speak about quality, but its only quality is that it’s easy to compute. In my code, I will show it means nothing, and provide you something more reliable to work with.

#3. WHAT ELSE WOULD YOU LIKE TO SHARE WITH PARTICIPANTS?

I’m a Java geek, through and through, but also ski in winter, run, play squash, sketch nudes, write books, and am currently learning Russian and Kotlin.

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

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