Yesterday, we held another Schneide Dev Brunch at last. The Dev Brunch is a regular brunch on a sunday, only that all attendees want to talk about software development and various other topics. If you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. The brunch was smaller this time, but we held the last brunch only three weeks ago. We had bright sunny weather and used our roof garden, but hurdled in the shadows. There were lots of topics and chatter. As always, this recapitulation tries to highlight the main topics of the brunch, but cannot reiterate everything that was spoken. If you were there, you probably find this list inconclusive:
Student again – from full employee to university
One of our attendees worked as a full-time software developer in the recent years and decided to study again. He told us about the practical challenges of an employee turned student:
- The bureaucracy at universities is highly developed and not on your side. It takes days to accomplish the tiniest step towards matriculation.
- To listen again. In the developer world, two hours of highly concentrated programming is satisfying, but two hours of concentrated listening to somebody who tells the important stuff only once is very hard. You are allowed to doze off (just like in big meetings), but it won’t do you no good.
- Higher-level mathematics. Suddenly, all that stuff about fourier transformation and matrices is very important again.
- Running on a lower gear. It seems like heaven to replace a 40h work week with a 20h study week, but the irregular pace (one day no lectures, one day lectures around the clock, etc.) will take its toll.
- Self-organization. Good developers are of course self-organized and know what to do: work on the most important issues in your issue tracker/todo list. But university will not write issues for you and you are the one to fill the todo list. We joked that a “master’s student JIRA” would actually be a good idea.
It was a very entertaining talk and we digressed lots of times. Let’s have a look at some artifacts we came across during our discussion:
- There seems to be a growing influence from military concepts on management. On book was specifically mentioned: “Turn the ship around” by David Marquet.
- “Bad work, good work and great work”. It’s a marketing video, but contains a message nonetheless. One practical advice is to not include “bad work knowledge” in your curriculum vitae, even if you have expertise in it. This minimizes the risk that your next job will contain a lot of “bad work” again.
The current state of JavaFX
Last year, JavaFX was aggressively marketed by Oracle as the next big thing in desktop UI. The claims and promises seem to finally be fulfilled. The combination of Java 8 and the latest JavaFX is especially joy-bringing. The JavaFX core is included in Java 8 and brings a lot of little but essential improvements. You can layout and design your graphical interfaces with a WYSIWYG editor and store it in XML-based layout files. These layouts are loaded, combined with custom logic and bound to custom data sources. The styling is based on a slightly outdated CSS dialect, but very powerful and done right in comparison to styling in past toolkit like Swing or SWT.
The best thing about JavaFX is that much less GUI code is needed for more pleasant user experiences. The toolkit feels alive and the details tell that the developers care and eat their own dogfood. Integration in the Eclipse IDE is enhanced by the e(fx)clipse project.
Our attendee has hands-on experience with Swing, SWT/JFace and JavaFX. If pressed to choose the technology for a new project, he would choose JavaFX anytime now.
Efficiency killers
We also traded tales about the most efficient efficiency killers in software development that we actually observed or endured:
- Taking away notebooks and desktop computers and replacing them with zero clients – for developers that really need their multi-cores and gigabytes.
- Restricting every employee to one (and only one!) computer. If you happen to choose a notebook, you probably don’t need that extra monitor, do you?
- Installing a “privilege management” software. Basically, this software works like a firewall against user inputs. You want to install a new printer driver? It will be cheaper and faster to carve your text in stone slabs.
- Fragmenting the company networks. This is actually a very good idea. You can have a wild-west style network for developers and a “privilege managed” one for management. It gets complicated when you need to cross the canyons everytime to get work done. Just imagine that your repository is behind a firewall and you need a clearance every time you want to commit/push.
Introduction to warfare
The last main topic was an overview of a self-study on warfare. And because the typical software developer won’t move whole armies around, it concentrated more on the principles and strategies of “common” warfare, which includes everyday conflicts as well as campaigns for a certain goal (e.g. establishing a technology). Three books serve as stepping stones:
- “The art of war” by Sun Tzu. The ancient classic book about warfare. There are probably a dozen different translations of the original chinese text, but they will only serve as a starter. This book alone will probably don’t give you deep insights, but you will come back to it often when you venture deeper into the mindset of warriors and generals.
- “Die Kunst der List” by Harro von Senger. This german book describes the political and rhetorical battle moves that are often used in everyday life. These so-called strategems can be identified and parried if you know about them. Most of us can react to some strategems by learnt lessons, but it certainly helps to be keen about the rest of them, too.
- “The 33 Strategies of War” by Robert Greene. This book doesn’t mess around. It is part of the “immoral series” of books about topics that don’t get discussed in this clarity often. You’ll learn much about strategies, their actual application in history (not only on the battlefield, but on movie sets, offices and political stages) and how to counter them. The book has a lot of content and many ideas and concepts to think about. And it contains an exhaustive list of literature to continue reading.
Is TDD dead?
We continued our discussion about the debate around David Heinemeier Hansson’s frontal attack on the hype around Test Driven Development. There were some new insights and an improved understanding about the manyfold contents of the hangout discussions.
Epilogue
As usual, the Dev Brunch contained a lot more chatter and talk than listed here. The high number of attendees makes for an unique experience every time. We are looking forward to the next Dev Brunch at the Softwareschneiderei. And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.
Schneide Blog 