June Triple Bill: Cultivating Code; Supporting the Newcomers; Intro to Arel
Thursday 15th June 7:00pm at The Manchester Digital Laboratory (MadLab)
This month we have not one, not two, but three talks for you! The talks start at 7:15pm and we'll have food and refreshments at the end, thanks to our sponsor FreeAgent.
Cultivating Code by Ceri Shaw
“The Pragmatic Programmer” first introduced me to the idea that writing software is like planting a garden. Over the years I’d forgotten the importance of the metaphor, until recently when I started working on my real-world garden. Musing on my day in the office whilst tending my plants, I realised gardening really does have a lot in common with working with legacy code.
With a 10-year-old, monolithic code base that’s still being worked on, staying on top of maintenance at FreeAgent is no easy matter. In this talk I’ll share how thinking about development in terms of gardening has helped me to understand the maintenance burden. I’ll talk about how we handle routine and exceptional maintenance in the product teams at FreeAgent and I’ll share some of the techniques we use to balance maintenance with feature development.
Supporting the Newcomers by Lola Odelola
Many companies often struggle to support junior developers properly. I'll be sharing what has helped me progress as a junior developer. There are key things I think it necessary for juniors to properly take their careers to the next level.
Introduction to Arel by Eva Koleli
The talk will be an introduction to Arel, discussing: what Arel is and when to use it; the syntactic differences from ActiveRecord; and examples of query building with Arel.
About our speakers
Ceri Shaw has been developing software for almost 15 years in a variety of languages from C++ to Ruby. She is currently a Team Lead at FreeAgent where she leads the workflow team in developing new features for their cloud-based accounting software. She loves the challenge of figuring out how to develop the right software and much to her own surprise really enjoys being a technical manager as well.
Lola Odelola is a software engineer, poet, and founder of blackgirl.tech, an organisation that aims to encourage more black girls, women and non-binary people to learn and explore technology.
Eva Koleli is a software engineer at FreeAgent, working with the Workflow team. She has 5 years of working experience in Ruby on Rails and Java. Recently, she has been focusing on front-end technologies like React and Redux.
Thanks to FreeAgent, our sponsors
This month's NWRUG is sponsored by FreeAgent, one of the leading online accounting platforms in the UK with over 50,000 customers and continued fast growth. They're on a mission to make businesses happier and more successful by putting them in control of their finances. Their app is already loved by thousands of freelancers, small business owners and accountants. They're also looking to hire senior software engineers to join their team.
Let us know you're attending on our Meetup page.