A week ago, we held another Schneide Dev Brunch, a regular brunch on the second sunday of every other (even) month, only that all attendees want to talk about software development and various other topics. So if you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. The brunch was a little sparsely attented this time but there was enough stuff to talk about. As usual, a lot of topics and chatter were exchanged. 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:
Review of San Francisco
As it turned out, San Francisco might be half a planet away, but several of our attendees happened to live there for a while. They described the city and its culture to us and shared stories about specific persons and places. For a moment, San Francisco was just around the corner.
Review Ninja
One reason that San Francisco came up was the mentioning of Review Ninja, a second-generation code review tool with one of the coolest project URLs ever. If you ever were smitten by code review tools like gerrit, then Review Ninja might be worth a look. It has a lightweight and simplistic approach to a activity that could as well end up being a bureaucratic nightmare.
Be convincing
Another topic was the art of being convincing – to convince people of something useful but unfamiliar. We concluded that you cannot change people, no matter the effort. Only people can change people. You can try to facilitate their change, though. But don’t expect appreciation or even acknowledgement for your effort. Everybody will be convinced that they came up with the solution themselves. That’s the art of being convincing – or so we convinced ourselves.
Google recruitment process
We spent a lot of time discussing the Google recruitment process that one attendee had just successfully passed. But it’s a long and extensive process, so our timeframe fit. There is a book, “Cracking the Coding Interview” by Gayle Laakmann McDowell, that seems to be quite useful for preparation on the daylong in-depth interview marathon that needs to be mastered if you want to join Google. A number of similar books try to teach you the knowledge necessary to pass the recruitment process – not the job that usually follows, mind you, just the recruitment. Our participant counted more than thirty distinguishable contacts with Google during the process. The process itself is highly formalized, while interviews are performed by normal engineers on Google’s side. The comparability between applicants is achieved through the great number of interviews to even out random outliers.
Nearly all big IT companies utilize a similar recruitment process, so this insight can be applied nearly everywhere: If you want to be recognized as talented, you have to be prepared for the tests to come. Don’t assume that your interviewer presupposes anything about your abilities. Just because you have a degree in computer sciences doesn’t mean you know how to program, for example. They will test for that, and with rather challenging tasks, so better learn your stuff again.
Work environment
Anticipating the next topic, we talked about different workplace setups, like open-plan offices, separate rooms for everyone and the like. A great insight was that very different preferences exist. The ideal work environment of one developer is a nightmare for the next. And now imagine how difficult it gets to agree on a trade-off in a bigger team. We couldn’t even agree on music vs. silence for in-zone programming sessions, let alone the style of music that should be playing.
Room setup
As a practical exercise, we tried to rearrange the desks in the Softwareschneiderei to increase the number of desks on our second floor. We started without any restrictions on placement and iterated through several layouts, discussing several side-effects and drawbacks in our solutions. In the end, two applicable layout alternatives survived our weeding process. It was a lesson in group dynamics and emergent rulesets and even gave us a viable result.
What defines object orientation?
We talked about the different approaches to define object orientation in terms of developer thinking. The classic approach of giving entities an identity was explored as well as the rather personal definition of flowing functionality instead of flowing data. We agreed that knowing all kinds of programming paradigms (with imperative, object oriented and functional being the major ones) enables developers to make the right choices for the task at hand. Being unable to choose leads to being ineffective fast.
The Java Memory Model
A short recap of the very informative and insightful talk about the Java Memory Model given by one of our attendees closed our brunch. The Java Memory Model (or any other memory model in fact) is a great help in determining if something weird can possibly happen with your code, like one thread observing a field X being set first and Y second, while another thread swears that Y was set first and X later. A memory model helps you to understand the quantum mechanics of your programming language and therefore survive multithreaded programming. And a simple rule will let you understand the vast majority of the Java Memory Model, as shown in the talk. I highly recommend you read up about the memory model of your favorite programming language.
Epilogue
As usual, the Dev Brunch contained a lot more chatter and talk than listed here. The 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.
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