New blog domain: kula.blog

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It's still work in progress but new posts will be published on  https://kula.blog/ Thanks to 11ty base blog RSS is working from the start so it should be easy to add to your reader if you still use any :) If now then I hope you can sign up to the newsletter where I'll be publishing new posts and interesting articles to it from time to time. Please use  kula.blog  from now on.
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CraftConf 2016 Review

By K -

Last week I have attended Craft Conference for the first time and I've decided to share my experience.

My favourite presentations:

  • Dan North - "Embracing uncertainty"
  • Jez Humble - "You Can Have It All: Software Development at Ludicrous Speed"

Some other worth mentioning:

  • Adrian Cockcroft - "The Evolution of Microservices"
  • Marty Cagan - "Great Product Team, Successful Product"
  • Doc Norton - "The Technical Debt Trap"
  • Yao Yue - "Toward Better Design and Code"

Most important takeaway:

Most important lesson for me was to be reminded about happiness and job satisfaction. The best way to make sure that something will be done is to let people have fun doing it. For example: if a developer can use this new language or framework she is enthusiastic about it's more likely she will do it just because it will be fun for her. No one likes to do chores, and getting money for that is not going to help much.

Other interesting themes/ideas:

Microservices - they are everywhere, and there are lots of tools that I haven't even heard about. A lot of innovation happens in this area but on the other hand, most companies don't need microservices and they actually might introduce more problems than benefits.
Pair Programming - it was inspiring to see about 90% of the attendees to raise their hands when asked if they program in pairs.
Relay/Falcor/om.next - I was sceptical but it might make sense to speed up development if everyone is a full-stack developer and maybe if different clients have really different needs - so that one REST API would be really inefficient. I still think most companies can do just fine without them.
Full Spectrum Developers - the main idea is that developer should know something about everything in the business. Some UX, finance, design, operations, management, estimation etc. At the end of the presentation with this idea, there was this really good question: how do you convince business people to be "Full Spectrum"? It was a brilliant question, but it showed up to late so it's something I think about after the conference.

Quality - a lot of talks were about the quality of what we do. Most speakers were convincing us that we should always create hight quality code (some even presented proofs). Yao Yue even told us to refactor while doing business features and just add this artificial time to the features. Some may disagree but in my opinion she's right. Most of the time business don't really know what it means, and what are the consequences of cutting corners. Most professions have government imposed acceptance criteria with inspectors and tests - if we want IT to stay how it is we should make sure to create quality code and be moral in the code we write. I recommend reading: Being A Developer After 40 by Adrian Kosmaczewski.

Thanks to Mateusz Kwaśniewski for reading drafts of this post and letting me know about Craft Conf this year.

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