On Reading Code # “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.” –Stephen King Quite a while ago GeeCon published the video taped talk of Kevlin Henney on "Cool Code". This keynote is great to watch for everyone who loves to read code - not the one you encounter in real world enterprise systems - but the one that truely teaches you lessons: ...
Teddy in Poznan # Some images taken in Poznan after GeeCon - big Thanks! to Dawid for giving advise on where to go for sightseeing, exhibitions and going-out. The tour started close to river Warta - it being a sunny day it seemed like a perfect fit to just walk through the city, starting along the river headed towards the cathedral: After that Poznan Citadel was a great place to spend lunch time - sitting somewhere green and shady: ...
GeeCon - Testing hell and how to fix it # The last regular talk I went to was on testing hell at Atlassian – in particular the JIRA project. What happened to JIRA might actually be known to developers who have to deal with huge legacy projects that predate the junit and dependency injection era: Over time their test base grew into a monster that was hard to maintain and didn’t help at all with making developers confident on checkin time that they would not break anything. ...
GeeCon - Solr at Allegro # One particularly interesting to me was on Allegro’s (polish Ebay) Solr usage. In terms of numbers: They have 20Mio offers in Poland, another 10Mio active offers in partnering countries. In addition in their index there are 50Mio inactive offers in Poland and 40 Mio closed offers outside that country. They serve 8Mio updates a day, that is 100 updates a second. Those are related to start/end of bidding phase, buy now actions, cancelled bids, bids themselves. ...
GeeCon - managing remote projects # In his talk on visibility in distributed teams Pawel Wrzeszcz motivated why working remotely might be benefitial for both, employees (less commute time, more family time) as well as employers (hiring world wide instead of local, getting more talent in). He then went into more detail on some best practices that worked for his company as well as for himself. When it comes to managing your energy the trick mainly is to find the right balance between isolating work from private live (by having a separate area in your home, having a daily routine with fixed start and end times) and integrating work into your daily live and loving what you do: The more boring your job is, the less likely you are going to succeed when working remotely. ...
GeeCon - failing software projects fast and rapidly # My second day started with a talk on how to fail projects fast and rapidly. There are a few tricks to do that that relate to different aspects of your project. Lets take a look at each of them in turn. The first measures to take to fail a project are organisational really: Refer to developers as resources – that will demotivate them and express that they are replaceable instead of being valuable human beings. ...
GeeCon - TDD and it’s influence on software design # The second talk I went to on the first day was on the influence of TDD on software design. Keith Braithwaite did a really great job of first introducing the concept of cyclomatic complexity and than showing at the example of Hudson as well as many other open source Java projects that the average and mean cyclomatic complexity of all those projects actually is pretty close to one and when plotted for all methods pretty much follows a power law distribution. ...
GeeCon - Randomized testing # I arrived late during lunch time on Thursday for GeeCon – however just in time to listen to one of the most interesting talks when it comes to testing. Did you ever have the issue of writing code that runs well in your development environment but crashes as soon as it’s rolled out at customers only to find out that their Locale setting was causing the issues? ...
GeeCon 2012 - part 1 # Devoxx, Java Posse, Qcon, Goto Con, an uncountable number of local Java User Groups – aren’t there enough conferences on just Java, that weird programming language that “makes developers stupid by letting them type too much boiler plate” (Keith Braithwaite)? I spent Thursday and Friday last week in Poznan at a conference called GeeCon – there main focus is on anything Java, including TDD, Agile and testability. ...