Went to Developer Developer Developer North 2 the other day. I’d not been to one of these before, but it was free, and local, so seemed like a good option for a bunch of us from work to attend.
I went to the following sessions:
10 Practices that make me the Developer I am today – Garry Shutler
Nice talk to start the day. Nothing ground-breaking, but I was encouraged to be more of a Code Nazi, and reminded that I should really try to learn a new language next year…
The Good, The Bad and The Automated – Paul Stack
Brilliant talk around Continuous Delivery and DevOps. Some amazing stats around how the likes of FaceBook and Amazon deploy up to ~1000 times a day…
We’ve done some good work ourselves with our build scripts, but we really need to work more closely with our Ops team to automate more of the environment set-up. We also just started implementing feature switches, and I think this is something we must make more use of. If we set it up properly we’d all be able to develop in a single Main code branch. Apparently FaceBook have their next six months of features all deployed to production, but all initially turned off using feature switches.
I need to read Jez Humble’s Continuous Delivery and the Dev Ops Cookbook, when it comes out.
BDD – Look Ma! No Frameworks – Gemma Cameron
Lot of familiar stuff about BDD, especially having just finished Gojko’s Specification by Example. Some good points around the importance of using conversations and examples to reach a shared understanding, and ubiquitous language. I like the idea of thinking of the spec as being a reminder for yourself in six months time.
Whilst I agreed with Gemma’s point that learning the right techniques is more important than picking up shiny new tools, to say that all frameworks are bad seemed flawed – especially when the first line of the code sample was
using NUnit.Framework;
JavaScript Sucks and It Doesn’t Matter – Rob Ashton
I think Rob wound a few people up, but I found him pretty amusing. I couldn’t help thinking throughout the talk that he could be Trevor’s evil twin.
Need to check out the zombie and PhantomJS headless browsers for testing.
Event Driven Architectures – Ian Cooper
Good deep dive talk. Reminded me I find this kind of architectural work really interesting…
Overall a good day, and I even won a book in the raffle at the end – something about business metrics – there wasn’t much to choose from by the time I got up there…
Joe Blogs 