Recap of the Schneide Dev Brunch 2014-08-31

Yesterday, we held another Schneide Dev Brunch, 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 well-attended this time but the weather didn’t allow for an outside session. 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:

Docker – the new (hot) kid in town

Docker is the hottest topic in software commissioning this year. It’s a lightweight virtualization technology, except that you don’t obtain full virtual machines. It’s somewhere between a full virtual machine and a simple chroot (change root). And it’s still not recommended for production usage, but is already in action in this role in many organizations.
We talked about the magic of git and the UnionFS that lay beneath the surface, the ease of migration and disposal and even the relative painlessness to run it on Windows. I can earnestly say that Docker is the technology that everyone will have had a look at before the year is over. We at the Softwareschneiderei run an internal Docker workshop in September to make sure this statement holds true for us.

Git – the genius guy with issues

The discussion changed over to Git, the distributed version control system that supports every versioning scheme you can think of but won’t help you if you entangle yourself in the tripwires of your good intentions. Especially the surrounding tooling was of interest. Our attendees had experience with SmartGit and Sourcetree, both capable of awesome dangerous stuff like partial commmits and excessive branching. We discovered a lot of different work styles with Git and can agree that Git supports them all.
When we mentioned code review tools, we discovered a widespread suspiciousness of heavy-handed approaches like Gerrit. There seems to be an underlying motivational tendency to utilize reviews to foster a culture of command and control. On a technical level, Gerrit probably messes with your branching strategy in a non-pleasant way.

Teamwork – the pathological killer

We had a long and deep discussion about teamwork, liability and conflicts. I cannot reiterate everything, but give a few pointers how the discussion went. There is a common litmus test about shared responsibility – the “hold the line” mindset. Every big problem is a problem of the whole team, not the poor guy that caused it. If your ONOZ lamp lights up and nobody cares because “they didn’t commit anything recently”, you just learned something about your team.
Conflicts are inevitable in every group of people larger than one. We talked about team dynamics and how most conflicts grow over long periods only to erupt in a sudden and painful way. We worked out that most people aren’t aware of their own behaviour and cannot act “better”, even if they were. We learned about the technique of self-distancing to gain insights about one’s own feelings and emotional drive. Two books got mentioned that may support this area: “How to Cure a Fanatic” by Amos Oz and “On Liberty” from John Stuart Mill. Just a disclaimer: the discussion was long and the books most likely don’t match the few headlines mentioned here exactly.

Code Contracts – the potential love affair

An observation of one attendee was a starting point for the next topic: (unit) tests as a mean for spot checks don’t exactly lead to the goal of full confidence over the code. The explicit declaration of invariants and subsequent verification of those invariants seem to be more likely to fulfil the confidence-giving role.
Turns out, another attendee just happened to be part of a discussion on “next generation verification tools” and invariant checking frameworks were one major topic. Especially the library Code Contracts from Microsoft showed impressive potential to really be beneficial in a day-to-day setting. Neat features like continuous verification in the IDE and automatic (smart) correction proposals makes this approach really stand out. This video and this live presentation will provide more information.

While this works well in the “easy” area of VM-based languages like C#, the classical C/C++ ecosystem proves to be a tougher nut to crack. The common approach is to limit the scope of the tools to the area covered by LLVM, a widespread intermediate representation of source code.

Somehow, we came across the book titles “The Economics of Software Quality” by Capers Jones, which provides a treasure of statistical evidence about what might work in software development (or not). Another relatively new and controversial book is “Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly” from Bertrand Meyer. We are looking forward to discuss them in future brunches.

Visual Studio – the merchant nobody likes but everybody visits

One attendee asked about realistic alternatives to Visual Studio for C++ development. Turns out, there aren’t many, at least not free of charge. Most editors and IDEs aren’t particularly bad, but lack the “everything already in the box” effect that Visual Studio provides for Windows-/Microsoft-only development. The main favorites were Sublime Text with clang plugin, Orwell Dev-C++ (the fork from Bloodshed C++), Eclipse CDT (if the code assist failure isn’t important), Code::Blocks and Codelite. Of course, the classics like vim or emacs (with highly personalized plugins and setup) were mentioned, too. KDevelop and XCode were non-Windows platform-based alternatives, too.

Stinky Board – the nerdy doormat

One attendee experiments with input devices that might improve the interaction with computers. The Stinky Board is a foot-controlled device with four switches that act like additional keys. In comparison to other foot switches, it’s very sturdy. The main use case from our attendee are keys that you need to keep pressed for their effect, like “sprint” or “track enemy” in computer games. In a work scenario, there are fewer of these situations. The additional buttons may serve for actions that are needed relatively infrequently, but regularly – like “run project”.

This presentation produced a lot of new suggestions, like the Bragi smart headphones, which include sensors for head gestures. Imagine you shaking your head for “undo change” or nod for “run tests” – while listening to your fanciest tunes (you might want to refrain from headbanging then). A very interesting attempt to combine mouse, keyboard and joystick is the “King’s Assembly“, a weird two-piece device that’s just too cool not to mention. We are looking forward to hear more from it.

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.