Life as a Junior Developer and Everything You Wanted to Know About Coupling But Were Afraid to Ask
Thursday 21st July 6:30pm at The Manchester Digital Laboratory (MadLab)
Talk 1 – Life as a Junior Developer
Reiss and Brandon have recently got their first developer roles and are here to explain how they got here and what it's like being a junior developer. They'll compare their journeys, explain what to expect in an interview process, what the average day is like, what expectations are placed on a junior developer, and a few other things they've encountered along the way.
Brandon Burton is a largely self-taught junior developer working in Manchester and got to where he is relying on books, online resources and help from his local Ruby community. He's now trying to do whatever he can to give back to the software community and help other people who want to learn to code.
Reiss Johnson is an ex-photographer turned junior developer, a Makers Academy graduate and new to the world of software engineering. He's constantly battling with a massive daily-information overload and is passionate about good code and best practices. One of his missions now is to pass on the knowledge he has to those that wish to choose the same path as him.
Talk 2 – Everything You Wanted to Know About Coupling But Were Afraid to Ask
TDD is the panacaea of software development, the golden child of Extreme Programming. But there is a problem with test-driven development. A big problem. Everywhere I go, I see teams practicing TDD, and yet they are still creating horrible, smelly balls of mud. Code with many tests, and yet also many bugs. Code with many tests, but which cannot be refactored. How can that be possible?
The problem lies in the third step of the RED-GREEN-REFACTOR cycle. It's just too difficult!
In this talk we will explore a tool that can help us decide what to refactor and when. That tool is COUPLING (aka CONNASCENCE).
WARNING: Many of the slides in this talk will show code snippets.
Dr Kevin Rutherford is a software development coach and extreme programmer working for the XP Surgery. He is the creator of the vastly under-rated Reek code smell detector, and the vastly over-rated book 'Refactoring in Ruby'. If you have ever used Unix System V or taken out a mortgage in the UK, you have unwittingly used his code. He now spends much of his time teaching and mentoring senior developers throughout the UK in software craftsmanship. He was using vi before you were born.