Devoxx University – Productive programmer, HBase #

The first day at Devoxx featured several tutorials – most interesting to me was the pragramatic programmer. The speaker also is the author of the equally named book at O’Reilly. The book was the result of the observation that developers today are more and more IDE bound, no longer able to use the command line effectively. The result are developers that are unnecessarily slow when creating software. The goal was to bring usage patterns of productive software development to juniors how grew up in a GUI only environment. However half-way through the book, it became apparent that a book on command line wizardry only is barely interesting at all. So the focus was shifted and now includes more general productivity patterns.
The goal was to accelerate development – mostly by avoiding time consuming usage patterns (minimise mouse usage) and automation of repetitive tasks (computers are good at doing dull, repetitive tasks – that’s what they are made for.
Second goal was increasing focus. Two main ingredients to that are switching off anything that disturbs the development flow: No more pop-ups, not more mail notifications, no more flashing side windows. If you have ever had the effect of thinking “So late already?” when your colleagues were going out for lunch – then you know what is meant by being in the flow. It takes up to 20min to get into this mode – but just the fraction of a second to be thrown out. With developers being significantly more productive in this state it makes sense to reduce the risk of being thrown out.
Third goal was about canonicality, fourth one on automation.
During the morning I hopped on and off the Hadoop talk as well – the tutorial was great to get into the system, Tom White went into detail also explaining several of the most common advanced patterns. Of course not that much new stuff if you sort-of know the system already :)