2016

Apr 30, 2020 by Alexandru Bolboaca in

16 years of legacy code with mob programming and Lego | Joe Wright

Feb 13, 2017
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.

 

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#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)

 

 

 

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

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

Meet Joe Yoder, Keynote @ I T.A.K.E. Unconference

Mar 19, 2020

Joe Yoder, the internationally recognized leader in many facets of software development, will join the I T.A.K.E. Unconference 7th edition from Urbana, Illinois.

His specializations are Architecture, Analysis and Design, C#, Java, Smalltalk, Patterns, Agile Methods, Adaptable Systems, Refactoring, Reuse, and Frameworks.

Joe evolved from the Software Architecture and Patterns group at the University of Illinois. He has worked on various projects during his career that has incorporated many technologies. These range from stand-alone to client-server applications, web applications, web services, cloud computing, microservices, service-oriented architecture, multi-tiered, various databases, object-oriented, frameworks, human-computer interaction, collaborative environments, and domain-specific visual-languages.

In addition, these projects have spanned many domains, including Medical Information Systems, Financial Systems, Ordering, Import, Invoicing, Print, Shipping, Warehouse Management, Manufacturing, Medical Examination, Statistical Analysis, Scenario Planning, Client-Server Relational Database System for keeping track of shared specifications in a multi-user environment, Telecommunications Billing System, and Business & Medical Decision Making.

Besides his specializations, Joe has many years of practical hands-on experience where he has conducted architecture and design reviews of enterprise applications and systems, reviewed the design and implementation of various systems and frameworks, provided assessments and detailed analysis of existing systems, assisted with frameworks and object-oriented development, designing and performing custom training and leading various successful Agile teams.

Joe believes software is still too hard to change and wants to do something about this. He also believes that with good practices, putting the ability to change software into the hands of the people with the knowledge to change it, and bringing the business side closer to the development process is a promising avenue to solve this problem. He teaches and mentors developers on Agile and lean practices, architecture, building flexible systems, clean design, patterns, refactoring, and testing.

Recently Joe has been working with organizations and thought leaders on the best practices for including quality aspects throughout the complete software life cycle.

Curious to hear one of Joe’s latest talks? Join us on the 7th of April at the 7th edition of I T.A.K.E. Unconference.

I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016 – Ist day videos & slides

May 19, 2016

The first day of I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016 was a great success: 18 speakers from 8 different countries shared insights and latest trends on 5 different stages.

Live coding sessions, the talks & workshops received an excellent feedback. Also, everyone got involved during the Open Space, Lightning Talks, Product Development Track & Kata Lounge. In the evening, the event continued informally at Dinner & Coding with a stranger.

You can watch the videos from the event here. Find below the slides from day one. Slides from day 2 are here.

 

Developer’s Life

Franziska Sauwerwin – Raising the Bar 

Houssam Fakih & Borris Gonnot – Metrics for Good Developers

Claudia Rosu – Developer experience to Testing

Alastair Smith – Express Yourself!

Monica Obogeanu – How We Use BDD to Keep our Developers Smiling

 

Software Design

Ionut G. Stan – Let’s write a Parser!

 

Microservices

Tim Perry – Microservice Pipeline Architecture

Yegor Bugayenko – Microservices as Chat Bots

Cristiana Voicu & Cristian Andrei – Openstack in the Enterprise and you get your money from it

Condoiu Iuliana – Microservices-what tools do we use

 

Continous Deployment

Philipp Krenn – Automate all things AWS with Ansible

 

DevOps 

Phillipp Krenn – Painfree object-document mapping with Elasticresearch 

 

 

Autotesting & Design

Nicolas Frankel – Mutation Testing to the rescue of your tests

Alastair Smith – Test-Driving Your Database

Andreas Leidig & Robin Danzinger – Who is testing the mocks

 

A few thoughts from the participants

  • First of all, I want to congratulate you for the organisation (…)  You can be proud of your work. I spent an amazing time and the return on the invested time is 5/5
  • Open talks were excellent for networking and ideas exchange
  • The Product Development track was a useful and pleasant experience

 

 

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