Do more with less

The Clean Coder

I don't read many tech books, at least not as many as I should do. However, I've just finished 'The Clean Coder - A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers' by legendary software expert Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) and really enjoyed it.

Uncle Bob uses his vast experience in the industry to define what he thinks makes a professional software craftsman. He covers how to deal with conflict, impossible schedules, unreasonable managers and mounting pressure. He also explores time management, working environments and how best to get into the flow of coding. Bob makes some bold statements that many won't agree with, including about how much time outside of work professionals should be putting into their craft, but agree or not Bob always has some compelling arguments.

What I liked most about this book is Bob's honesty about the experiences he draws upon in his career. Even the brilliant Uncle Bob has made some big mistakes but is happy to retell these stories and highlight what he's learnt from his experiences. Bob's writing style makes it easy to follow and I'd recommend this to any software developers or managers looking for their next tech fix.

University of Nottingham Agile Software Development Talk

A work colleague and I recently attended the University of Nottingham Jubiliee Campus, to present a talk to second year Computer Science students that were taking part in the group project module. The talk was entitled 'What's it like to work in an agile software development team?'.

The talk focused on how the Esendex development team tackle software development, and we presented some ideas for the planning and development aspects of their own group projects. I did the same module when I was an undergraduate at Nottingham and the module stands out for me as the closest thing you experience at university to working as part of a real software team in industry.

It was tough selecting exactly what to put in the talk, 'agile development' is a broad subject and means different things to different people. We could have easily talked about the Agile Manifesto for the 50 minutes we had, but in the end I think we did well cherry picking the parts that would interest the students and be relevant to their group projects. We also thought it important to run through a demo of some of the concepts we talked about and this part was especially received well.

We carried out a 'mini retro' at the end of the talk, asking the students to leave some feedback on their way out. We split the board in two; 'What went well?' and 'What could have gone better?', providing the students with some post-its and pens. We were very pleased with the feedback, as you can see the feedback was 90% positive :)

You can't see the comments on that pic unfortunately, but here's some I've cherry picked...

Content truly excellent! All highly relevant & interesting, right level of detail.

First live demo from a guest lecturer :)

Great to see a live demo, putting theory into context.

Actually related to the group project.

Students might have struggled following the detail of some examples. Slow down a little. Font size & colour, for demo.

Here's the slides if you're interested, looking forward to getting invited back again next year hopefully.