Category: Dev Brunch

Recap of the Schneide Dev Brunch 2018-02-11

If you couldn’t attend the Schneide Dev Brunch at 11 February 2018, here is a summary of the main topics.

brunch64-borderedOn Sunday, February 11th, 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. This brunch was well-attended, with two new guests that seemed to feel comfortable after just a few minutes. The table provided just enough space for us. As usual, the main theme was that if you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. Because we were a larger group, we discussed with an agenda. 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:

Asciidoctor

Our first topic was a presentation of the asciidoc syntax and the asciidoctor converter. The asciidoc syntax can be used to describe structured textual content in a concise manner with a few funny special characters. It looks like markdown at the first glance, but has the benefit of being fully standardized and extensible instead of one of several competing dialects.

The asciidoctor is an active rewrite of the first asciidoc converter. Given the right set of formatters, you can generate a PDF, a self-contained interactive HTML presentation and a static web page from one single source. This follows the “one true source, many derived artifacts”-approach that every software developer should know by heart (Don’t Repeat Yourself!).

Because setting up a productive asciidoctor environment is still some manual work, one of our attendees has published a github repository that automates the manual work as much as possible: asciidoc presentation.

If you need an alternative to markdown or even TeX/LaTeX, have a look at asciidoc. It seems specifically aimed at software developers and is probably already integrated in your favorite IDE (the integration in IntelliJ is seamless).

Yarn

We discussed the two extreme approaches to handle dependencies for your project. The first extreme is to only include links to other projects/repositories that need to be fetched manually or automatically. Most modern build tools orientate towards this approach, even if there are some disadvantages like the recent Go/Github disturbance.

The second extreme is to include everything that’s needed in your repository. For a Javascript project that means that you provide your own, probably out-dated version of leftpad and thousand other libraries. You need a way to deal with transitive dependencies and keep an eye on all the versions to mitigate the risk of long-fixed vulnerabilities.

The second extreme is extremely helpful if you don’t have internet access but want to develop.

A good compromise is the local offline mirror, something that build tools/dependency managers like maven have for over a decade. This local repository is filled with all the leftpads and apache-commons that your projects need. If you checkout a new project, remember to make the build tool download the dependencies to your local repository before you go offline.

for Javascript, this concept seems a bit foreign. Who would develop for the web without the web, anyways? Yarn seems to provide a working offline mirror functionality for npm packages, though. Perhaps it is worth a look.

Opt-Out explained with groceries

During out dependency management discussion, we also compared downloadable installers with malware droppers. But that’s not where our comparisons stopped. We also came up with a good metaphor for Opt-In vs. Opt-Out methods.

If you enter a grocery store and grab a shopping cart, only to find that it already contains two or three packages of sweets and some overpriced milk, you chose an Opt-Out store. Your responsibility is to return the goods to their aisle or to buy them.

You’re probably used to Opt-In type grocery stores.

Book review: Functional Programming in Java

We took a look at Pierre-Yves Saumont’s book “Functional Programming in Java”. This book is a little bit odd in that you shouldn’t read it, you are meant to program it. Or at least try to solve the numerous training exercises and riddles. This makes it hard to read the paper version of the book, because it’s a pick-two situation of keyboard, mouse and book on your desk.

The book explains real functional programming and not the functional additions of Java 8. It explains it on top of the JVM, using Java’s language constructs. But, you will learn it from the origins and develop abstractions like Function oder Supplier yourself. Imagine you had all compiler magic of Java 8 but no JDK classes to leverage it – this book tells you how to use it.

It’s a good book, but unique in its style. It grounds on exercises and your own understanding of the material. It isn’t spoon-fed, you have to work for it yourself. It didn’t chose any existing pure functional language, but plain Java for this. So you have no excuse about weird syntax or unfamiliar ecosystems. It’s boring old Java turned in an exciting new way.

And if you are lazy and don’t feel like writing your own functional groundwork toolkit, you might want to look at vavr, a functional programming library for Java.

Polyglot language idioms

We discussed the portability of language idioms and highlighted the Curiously Recurring Template Pattern (CRTP) from C++. Then we spent some time explaining and understanding the CRTP and finally comparing it to similar things like Java’s Enum<E extends Enum<E>>. It can get wicked complex fast with those constructs.

Laser printer identification

Since 2011, we know that every single page of a color laser printer can be individually identified and traced back to your printer. This is common knowledge as stated on Wikipedia, but it still was a surprise to some of us. Why do we need such tracking? On request of many goverments.

Spectre and Meltdown

We didn’t repeat the fresh common knowledge about the nearly universal CPU security vulnaribilities Meltdown and Spectre. But we noted that it got eerily quiet, as if everybody holds their breath and waits for the morning clock to wake them up.

Some rumors has it that the current prototypes of ARM and Intel CPUs are not vulnerable, as if the manufacturers changed their speculative code execution unit long before the exploits came to light. Maybe they circumvented the problem by pure luck?

We hope to hit snooze soon.

Planned obsolescence

We discussed the notion of planned obsolescence. Typical consumer products have a flaw or weakness that is bound to break soon after manufacturer guarantee is void. Or it is deliberately incorporated into the product like page counters, waste tanks with limited capacity or the infamous short-lived light bulb.

A good start on the topic is the documentary “buy it for the waste” or “Kaufen für die Müllhalde” on german.

Given the recent noise around Apple battery life, we are now in an era where planned obsolescence is sold like a feature. Twenty-five years ago, this was Science Fiction. The author of this blog entry remembers a science fiction story by Robert Sheckley (“Utopia mit kleinen Fehlern” or “A Ticket to Tranai” in english). The protagonist reaches a planet that seems to be perfect. It is so perfect that nothing breaks anymore. The industry is desperate and sees the protagonist as a genius when he invents “planned obsolescence” and “designed discomfort” as means to raise sales. The planet has several other flaws as well. The story and the whole book is worthwhile and right on topic.

Book review (again): Clean Architecture

At last, we spoke about Robert C. Martin’s (Uncle Bob’s) new book “Clean Architecture”. I’ve already published my book review on our blog, but added some impressions and context after thinking about the book for some more time. Summary: The book is good, even if nearly half the pages might qualify as filler material and there are only two main messages. If the announcement of Uncle Bob on the last page in the Appendix becomes true, you might want to skip his next book, though.

Another book review for the future might be the new Effective Java, 3rd edition.

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 in April. We even have some topics still on the agenda (like a report about first-hand experiences with the programming language Rust). And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.

Recap of the Schneide Dev Brunch 2017-10-08

If you couldn’t attend the Schneide Dev Brunch at 08th of October 2017, here is a summary of the main topics.

brunch64-borderedLast sunday, 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. This brunch was smaller, which enabled us to use the meeting table with some comfort. Sometimes, with many attendees and bad weather, this table can get a little bit crowded. As usual, the main theme was that if you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. Because we were a small group, we discussed without an agenda. 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:

Area of training

We shared some stories about top-notch video game players and how they keep up with the demand to stay competitive. Similar stories can be told about every topic imagineable: What did the “king of the hill” do to rise to such levels? The answer is always: training. Excessive, brutal training. They are first in the gym and lock the door late at night because they are the last, too. The use every waking second for practice and repetition. They are obsessed with being “the best”. If you want to follow such a story in movie format, you might enjoy “Whiplash”, a movie about an aspiring expert drummer that also highlights the delicate trainer/trainee dynamics. If you are more interested in the strategies of obtaining mastery, the book “Mastery” by Robert Greene will give you a lot of insights.

With this background, we asked around what our area of training (not expertise, not mastery – just training) is. The answers varied wildly, from the obvious “programming” to “whisky” (as in whisky tasting and collecting whisky). It’s an interesting question: what goal are you actively pursuing at the moment?

Hacking challenges

Evolving from the first topic, we talked about coding challenges and “capture the flag” hacking contests. If you aren’t the grandmaster in the area of the contest, you’ll get the most out of it by following the participating teams and trying to understand their approaches.  The local security capture the flag team of the KIT is especially open with their approach, their failures and successes. You might want to check out their website.

One challenge included trying to break a whitebox encryption, which is an interesting topic in itself. Maybe somebody can read up on this topic and give a little presentation in the future. Another challenge seemed to lead to an elaborate buffer overflow attack, when in reality, it could be solved with a “simple” use-after-free attack.

An useful starting point for aspiring security hackers might be the CTF (capture the flag) field guide. There are also some online challenges for basic training purposes, like the cryptopals or the bandit wargame. Thanks Tobias for the links!

If you are more interested in playful challenges and don’t want to show up on somebody’s radar, programming/hacking games like TIS-100 are perfect for you. Our game night with TIS-100 is still in vivid memory.

Software Architecture training

There are a lot of programming contests and hacking challenges out there. But what about dry-run training for software architects? On a related scale, there are hundreds of training simulators for the foot soldier (called ego-shooters), but little games for the aspiring officer/general. The website armchair general lists a few and even has some contests, but they lack the depth of real experience. Similarly, the training for software architects will probably be clean-room exercises, when in reality, the customer needs, the team mood, the latest fad in technology and even the weather will influence the architecture just as well as textbook knowledge.

We couldn’t discuss this topic to its full potential, so it will re-appear on the agenda of the next Dev Brunch. And its open for discussion in the comments: What are good books and trainings for software architects?

Thomas pointed us to the Architectural Katas by Ted Neward. Perhaps we should schedule a Schneide Event to try them out?

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 in December. We even have some topics still on the agenda (like a report about first-hand experiences with the programming language Rust). And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.

Recap of the Schneide Dev Brunch 2017-04-09

If you couldn’t attend the Schneide Dev Brunch at 09th of April 2017, here is a summary of the main topics.

brunch64-borderedLast sunday, 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. This brunch was well-attended and opened the sunroof season for us. We even had to take turns on the sunny places because we didn’t want to catch a sunburn in April. As usual, the main theme was that if you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. Because we were very invested in our topics, we established an agenda for the event. 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:

Online courses

Our first topic was an report on an ongoing online course, a so-called MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on the topic “Software Design for Non-Designers”. It aims at bringing basic knowledge of UX and UI design to programmers, who frequently lack even the most fundamental principles of design (other than code design and even that is open for discussion). A great advantage of these MOOCs is that you can minimize your brutto time investment and therefor maximize your netto yield. You are not bound to a certain place, free from specific times (other than the interaction with other participants) and yet free to engage in a community of peers. The question that remains is how valueable the certificate will be. But the initial expectations are met: The specific course is very practical and requires moderate effort in reasonable periods.

One crucial aspect is the professionality of the presenting lecturer. In this MOOC, there are talk-oriented presenters and then there is Scott Klemmer. His lectures stand out because he writes on an invisible wall before him. The camera looks through the wall. What seems like nice CGI turns out to be a real glass pane. Mr. Klemmer puts down his note in mirror writing! Once you realize that, you cannot help it but be in awe.

There are a lot of MOOCs nowadays. Other courses that got mentioned cover the topic of machine learning https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning and Getting Started with Redux (a famous Javascript framework) by Dan Abramov on Egghead: https://egghead.io/courses/getting-started-with-redux. Some courses even take place on Youtube, if you manage to avoid the comment sections, like the talks from Geoffrey Hinton about neuronal networks and machine learning. Mr. Hinton is part of the Google Brain team.

The critical part of each MOOC is the final examination. Some courses require online or even real-time tests, some online provide certificates for test results in a certain timespan. Usually, the training assignments are peer reviewed by other course participants.

We will probably see this type of knowledge transfer more often in the future.

Interesting websites

While we talked about a lot of topics at once, some websites and projects got mentioned. I include them here without full coverage of the topics that led to it:

  • jsfiddle: A website that provides a quick sketchboard for web technologies like Javascript, HTML and CSS. It’s like a repl for the web.
  • regex101: A website that provides a quick sketchboard (and debugger) for regular expressions in different languages. It’s like an online IDE for regular expressions.
  • codefights: A website that puts you in the fighting pit for developers. Prove your programming skills against competition all around the globe!
  • vimgolf: A website that lets you prove your proficiency in the only text editor that counts: vim. Every keystroke counts and a mouse cannot be found!

Some of these websites might be a lot more fun in a team, except the regex one. Don’t use regular expressions in a team project! It’s a violation of the sane developer’s rules of engagement.

Workplace conflicts

One participant reported about his latest insights in conflict management during work. He applied the concepts of warfare and the four steps of complex tasks to recent disputes and had tremenduous results. Even the introduction chapter of the Strategies of War book was enough to install new notions and terms into his planning and acting. He was astounded by the positive effects of his new portfolio.

The new terminology seems to be the essential part. European (or even western) adults don’t learn the terminology of conflict and therefore cannot process disputes on a rational level, only with emotions. You cannot plan or communicate with emotions, so you cannot plan your conflict behaviour. As soon as you have the language to describe the things you perceive, you can analyze them, reflect on them and plan for them. Making a solid plan (other than “go in and win somehow”) is the best preparation for an upcoming conflict. Words shape our world. I’ve seldomly seen it clearer than in this report.

Just for starters, there is a difference between a “friend” and an “ally”.

Project documentation

An open question to all participants was our handling of documentation efforts in a project, be it for the user, customer or following developer. We discussed it with this open scope and came up with some tools that I can repeat here:

  • The arc42 software architecture template can help to shape the documentation effort for future developers or current developers if they aren’t included in the architecture effort.
  • The user manual is often written in TEX. Developers are used to the tool by constant exposition during their academic studies.
  • One idea was to generate the requirements for the developers from the user manual, as in “user manual first” or “user manual driven development”.
  • The good old Markdown syntax is useable but has its limits in top-notch aesthetics.
  • We see some potential in ASCIIDoc, but it needs to improve further to play in the same league as other tools.
  • Several participants have tried to automate the process of taking screenshots of the software for usage in various documents. If you want to try this, be warned! There are many detail problems that need to be solved before your solution will be fully automatic and reliable. A good starting point for thoughts is the “handbook data set” that can reproduce the same screenshot content (like entries in lists, etc.) in a different software version.

In the outskirt area of this discussion, the worthwhile talk “Stop Refactoring!” by Nat Pryce was mentioned. He presents an interesting take on the old question of “good enough”.

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 in June. We even have some topics already on the agenda (like a report about first-hand experiences with the programming language Rust). And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.

Recap of the Schneide Dev Brunch 2017-02-12

If you couldn’t attend the Schneide Dev Brunch at 12th of February 2017, here is a summary of the main topics.

brunch64-borderedYesterday at sunday, 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. This brunch was a little smaller in numbers of attendents, but very interesting nonetheless. As usual, the main theme was that if you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. Because we were very invested in our topics, we established an agenda for the event. 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:

Household roboters

We started our brunch talk by mentioning the services our five years old roombas provide for us, especially keeping the floor free of any small things. The biggest effect when having an electronic pet like a roomba is that you learn to keep your things above ground, especially cords with expensive electronics on the other end. The continuous elimination of dust is just a positive bonus on top of your behaviour adjustment. You keep the floor tidy, the roomba just mercilessly enforces this rule.

Today, there are many alternatives to the original roomba and most have really nice features and abilities. So no matter what brand you buy, you’ll get a capable floor police.

Code Review priorities

In our recent dev brunches, we talked about code review tools and code review habits. This time, we talked about code review priorities and the sorry state we are still in with current tools. We worked out that its nearly useless to only show the diff with a few lines of surrounding code and expect a thorough review. Even the concept of “changed files” is rather distracting in an object-oriented language. But even the current tools are only as good as we make use of them.

The first priority of code reviews should be finding and eliminating bugs – “real” bugs that would have had surfaced in production otherwise and “hypothetical” bugs that could have shown up in production. This means that code review is in its core an activity for the user of the software. Only second priority is the understandibility of the source code. If the reviewer doesn’t understand the code, chances are high that nobody will, including the author in a few weeks or months. Cleaning up the code now mitigates the problem for the lowest possible cost because the “hurdle of understanding” isn’t raised yet. A code review should never work on the level of linters and should not address topics that can be checked by an automatic tool. Suggestions about refactorings should be kept to a minimum because they may serve no purpose if the code isn’t touched again. Refactor when the code is opened for the second edit, not on the first review. Review the code on the semantic level, not on the syntactic.

And keep in mind that code review tend to be used for conditioning remarks (“don’t do that”, “this is ugly”, “I don’t approve”, etc.). Try to avoid conditioning and strive to provide educational comments (“if you change this to that, then you’ll profit from this benefit”, “here’s a suggestion for a better approach and here’s why it is better”, etc.). But we also discussed that at this point, the code review remarks are probably better said in a pair programming session.

Code reviews are a powerful tool for development teams, but with power comes danger. Hopefully, we get adequate software tools to help us avoid the common traps soon.

Time management

Out of interest, we talked about some principles and practices to better manage one’s time.

The first thing to be aware of are the two fundamentally different schedules of management and development. The manager’s schedule is clocked in 30 minute intervals and driven by outside demand (meaning that a manager idles when not requested), while the maker’s schedule works with 4-hour blocks of uninterrupted, deeply concentrated work. You can probably see the problems that arise when somebody in a maker cycle is interrupted multiple times as if he was in a manager cycle. The first thing you can do is to announce your maker cycles (by clear “busy right now” indicators like headphones or a “do not disturb” sign) or announce your manager cycles much to the effect of consultation hours. Let your disturber know if he can disturb safely or if even the question causes damage.

Another important thing is to arrange your surrounding according to your schedule. Your schedule is so important that you should choose your service providers according to it. For example, if you work full time, look for hairdressers that work saturdays or dentists that offer appointments in the night. If you need to contact people for personal matters during work hours, allocate a specific timebox each day or at one day in the week and do it then. Announce this timebox to everybody who might want to contact you during work. This way, to can differentiate people that respect your (announced!) schedule and people that don’t. Depending on your rigorousness, you can cut the people that harm your schedule out of your life.

Work only with people who value your expectations (if reasonable). If you give a task to somebody, let’s say a craftsman, and state the deadline, you need to be sure the deadline is met without you checking or the craftsman will report back in time. Don’t give tasks to people who leave you in the lurch.

It all boils down to keep the control about your calendar. Whenever you give somebody else the opportunity to “conquer” a slice of your available time at their convenience, you increase your own inconvenience.

Karlsruhe C++ User Group

The year 2017 started with a new-founded C++ user group in karlsruhe that started with great events. David, the organisator of the user group is a regular attendee at our Dev Brunch and reported about his experiences with the boot process of the user group. He found a sponsor in the Clausmark GmbH and accompanied the monthly talks and programming events with a regular table that provides a similar format as our Dev Brunch, just in the night and not in the morning. We also talked about possible future content, and found code-centric “git guided live casts” a worthwhile format. Another format, the excellent code retreats are a great way to learn from others, but require a full day and not just two hours in the evening. The Game of Life kata is really fun, even when done repeatedly. Once you discover the solution in APL, you’ll want a special APL keyboard, too.

We are looking forward to hear great talks and meet cool people at the C++ user group Karlsruhe.

Sales knowledge

Our last topic in the bonus time (we were lenient with our scheduled time box, it’s sunday!) was about sales and the installation of sales knowledge and sales behaviour in a group of developers. We agreed that starting with Strategic Selling is a good choice because the process/framework is compatible with established developer culture and effective in its results. The resulting shift in the perception of occurrences is immediate and powerful. Strategic Selling is a rather old sales process that share some similarities with Solution Selling, another nerd-friendly process for complex business-to-business (B2B) sales.

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 in April. We even have some topics already on the agenda (like a report about first-hand experiences with the programming language Rust and a discussion about the concept of provisioning). And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.

Recap of the Schneide Dev Brunch 2016-12-11

If you couldn’t attend the Schneide Dev Brunch at 11th of December 2016, here is a summary of the main topics.

brunch64-borderedLast week at sunday, 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. This brunch was so well-attended that we had to cramp around our conference table and gather all chairs on the floor. As usual, the main theme was that if you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. Because we were so many, we established a topic list and an agenda for the event. 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:

Finland

We started with a report of one of our attendees who had studied in Finland for the last two years. He visited the Aalto university and shared a lot of cultural details about Finland and the Finnish people with us.

The two most important aspects of the report were sauna and singing. The Finnish love to visit a sauna, in fact, nearly every building has a functioning sauna. Every office building has a company sauna that will get visited often. So it might happen that your first visit of a company starts right in the sauna, naked with the bosses.

And the Finnish love singing so much that they usually start singing during the sauna session. There are open social events organized around singing together.

Alcohol plays a big role in Finland, mostly because the taxes makes it incredibly expensive to obtain a proper buzz. In the southern regions, much alcohol is imported from Russia or Estonia by ferry. There are even special ferry routes designed to be cost-neutral when shopping for alcohol. But alcohol isn’t the only thing that is made expensive with special taxes. Sugar and sugary food/drinks are heavily taxed, too. So it’s actually more expensive to eat unhealthy, which sounds like a good concept to counter some civilizational diseases.

The Finnish students often wear a special boilersuit during official events that identifies their affilition with their field of study and university. They apply patches and stickers to their suit when they have completed certain tasks or chores. It’s actually a lot like a military uniform with rank and campaign insignia. Only that the Finnish student boilersuit may not be cleaned or washed other than jumping into a body of water with you in it. And the Finnish lakes are frozen most of the year, with temperatures of -27 °C being nothing extraordinary.

As you probably have guessed right now, costs for rent and electricity are high. Our attendee enjoyed his time there, but is also glad to have the singing separated from the alcohol for the most part.

Lambdas and Concurrency

The next question revolved around the correlation between lambda expressions and concurrent execution of source code. The Vert.x framework relies heavily on lambdas and provides reactive programming patterns for Java. As such, it is event driven and non blocking. That makes it hard to debug or to reason about the backstory if an effect occurs in production. The traditional tools like stacktraces don’t tell the story anymore.

We took a deep dive into the concepts behind Optionals, Promises and Futures (but forgot to talk about the Expected type in C++). There is a lot of foggy implementation details in the different programming languages around these concepts and it doesn’t help that the Java Optional tries to be more than the C++ Optional, but doesn’t muster up the courage to be a full Monad. Whether deprecating the get()-method will make things better is open for discussion.

To give a short answer to a long discussion: Lambdas facilitate concurrent programming, but don’t require or imply it.

React.js and Tests

It was only a small step from the reactive framework Vert.x to the React.js framework in Javascript. One attendee reported his experiences with using different types of tests with the React framework. He also described the origin of the framework, mentioning the concept of Flux and Redux along the way.

Sorry if I’m being vague, but each written sentence about Javascript frameworks seem to have a halflife time of about six weeks. My take on the Javascript world is to lean back, grab some popcorn and watch the carnival from the terrace, because while we’re stuck with it forever, it is tragically unfortunate. Even presumed simple things like writing a correct parser for JSON end in nightmares.

It should be noted, though, that the vue.js framework entered the “assess” stage of the Thoughtworks Techradar, while AngularJS (or just Angular, as it should be called now) is in the “hold” stage.

Code Analysis

We also talked about source code analysis tools and plugins for the IDE. The gist of it seems to be that the products of JetBrains (especially the IntelliJ IDEA IDE) have all the good things readily included, while there are standalone products or plugins for other IDEs.

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 in February 2017. We even have some topics already on the agenda (like a report about first-hand experiences with the programming language Rust). And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.

Recap of the Schneide Dev Brunch 2016-08-14

If you couldn’t attend the Schneide Dev Brunch at 14th of August 2016, here is a summary of the main topics.

brunch64-borderedTwo weeks ago at sunday, 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. This brunch had its first half on the sun roof of our company, but it got so sunny that we couldn’t view a presentation that one of our attendees had prepared and we went inside. As usual, the main theme was that if you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. We were quite a lot of developers this time, so we had 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:

Open-Space offices

There are some new office buildings in town that feature the classic open-space office plan in combination with modern features like room-wide active noise cancellation. In theory, you still see your 40 to 50 collegues, but you don’t necessarily hear them. You don’t have walls and a door around you but are still separated by modern technology. In practice, that doesn’t work. The noise cancellation induces a faint cheeping in the background that causes headaches. The noise isn’t cancelled completely, especially those attention-grabbing one-sided telephone calls get through. Without noise cancellation, the room or hall is way too noisy and feels like working in a subway station.

We discussed how something like this can happen in 2016, with years and years of empirical experience with work settings. The simple truth: Everybody has individual preferences, there is no golden rule. The simple conclusion would be to provide everybody with their preferred work environment. Office plans like the combi office or the flexspace office try to provide exactly that.

Retrospective on the Git internal presentation

One of our attendees gave a conference talk about the internals of git, and sure enough, the first question of the audience was: If git relies exclusively on SHA-1 hashes and two hashes collide in the same repository, what happens? The first answer doesn’t impress any analytical mind based on logic: It’s so incredibly improbable for two SHA-1 hashes to collide that you might rather prepare yourself for the attack of wolves and lightning at the same time, because it’s more likely. But what if it happens regardless? Well, one man went out and explored the consequences. The sad result: It depends. It depends on which two git elements collide in which order. The consequences range from invisible warnings without action over silently progressing repository decay to immediate data self-destruction. The consequences are so bitter that we already researched about the savageness of the local wolve population and keep an eye on the thunderstorm app.

Helpful and funny tools

A part of our chatter contained information about new or noteworthy tools to make software development more fun. One tool is the elastic tabstop project by Nick Gravgaard. Another, maybe less helpful but more entertaining tool is the lolcommits app that takes a mugshot – oh sorry, we call that “aided selfie” now – everytime you commit code. That smug smile when you just wrote your most clever code ever? It will haunt you during a git blame session two years later while trying to find that nasty heisenbug.

Anonymous internet communication

We invested a lot of time on a topic that I will only decribe in broad terms. We discussed possibilities to communicate anonymously over a compromised network. It is possible to send hidden messages from A to B using encryption and steganography, but a compromised network will still be able to determine that a communication has occured between A and B. In order to communicate anonymously, the network must not be able to determine if a communication between A and B has happened or not, regardless of the content.

A promising approach was presented and discussed, with lots of references to existing projects like https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns and https://hyperboria.net/. The usual suspects like the TOR project were examined as well, but couldn’t hold up to our requirements. At last, we wanted to know how hard it is to found a new internet service provider (ISP). It’s surprisingly simple and well-documented.

Web technology to single you out

We ended our brunch with a rather grim inspection about the possibilities to identify and track every single user in the internet. To use completely exotic means of surfing is not helpful, as explained in this xkcd comic. When using a stock browser to surf, your best practice should be to not change the initial browser window size – but just see for yourself if you think it makes a difference. Here is everything What Web Can Do Today to identify and track you. It’s so extensive, it’s really scary, but on the other hand quite useful if you happen to develop a “good” app on the web.

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.

For the gamers: Schneide Game Nights

Another ongoing series of events that we established at Softwareschneiderei are the Schneide Game Nights that take place at an irregular schedule. Each Schneide Game Night is a saturday night dedicated to a new or unknown computer game that is presented by a volunteer moderator. The moderator introduces the guests to the game, walks them through the initial impressions and explains the game mechanics. If suitable, the moderator plays a certain amount of time to show more advanced game concepts and gives hints and tipps without spoiling too much suprises. Then it’s up to the audience to take turns while trying the single player game or to fire up the notebooks and join a multiplayer session.

We already had Game Nights for the following games:

  • Kerbal Space Program: A simulator for everyone who thinks that space travel surely isn’t rocket science.
  • Dwarf Fortress: A simulator for everyone who is in danger to grow attached to legendary ASCII socks (if that doesn’t make much sense now, lets try: A simulator for everyone who loves to dig his own grave).
  • Minecraft: A simulator for everyone who never grew out of the LEGO phase and is still scared in the dark. Also, the floor is lava.
  • TIS-100: A simulator (sort of) for everyone who thinks programming in Assembler is fun. Might soon be an olympic discipline.
  • Faster Than Light: A roguelike for everyone who wants more space combat action than Kerbal Space Program can provide and nearly as much text as in Dwarf Fortress.
  • Don’t Starve: A brutal survival game in a cute comic style for everyone who isn’t scared in the dark and likes to hunt Gobblers.
  • Papers, Please: A brutal survival game about a bureaucratic hero in his border guard booth. Avoid if you like to follow the rules.
  • This War of Mine: A brutal survival game about civilians in a warzone, trying not to simultaneously lose their lives and humanity.
  • Crypt of the Necrodancer: A roguelike for everyone who wants to literally play the vibes, trying to defeat hordes of monsters without skipping a beat.
  • Undertale: A 8-bit adventure for everyone who fancies silly jokes and weird storytelling. You’ll feel at home if you’ve played the NES.

The Schneide Game Nights are scheduled over the same mailing list as the Dev Brunches and feature the traditional pizza break with nearly as much chatter as the brunches. The next Game Night will be about:

  • Factorio: A simulator that puts automation first. Massive automation. Like, don’t even think about doing something yourself, let the robots do it a million times for you.

If you are interested in joining, let us know.

Recap of the Schneide Dev Brunch 2016-06-12

If you couldn’t attend the Schneide Dev Brunch at 12th of June 2016, here is a summary of the main topics.

brunch64-borderedLast sunday, 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. This brunch was a little different because it had a schedule for the first half. That didn’t change much of the outcome, though. As usual, the main theme was that if you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. We were quite a lot of developers this time, so we had 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:

The internals of git

Git is a version control system that has, in just a few years, taken over the places of nearly every previous tool. It’s the tool that every developer uses day in day out, but nobody can explain the internals, the “plumbing” of it. Well, some can and one of our attendees did. In preparation of a conference talk with live demonstration, he gave the talk to us and told us everything about the fundamental basics of git. We even created our own repository from scratch, using only a text editor and some arcane commands. If you visited the Karlsruhe Entwicklertag, you could hear the gold version of the talk, we got the release candidate.

The talk introduced us to the basic building blocks of a git repository. These elements and the associated commands are called the “plumbing” of git, just like the user-oriented commands are called the “porcelain”. The metaphor was clearly conceived while staring at the wall in a bathroom. Normal people only get to see the porcelain, while the plumber handles all the pipework and machinery.

Code reviews

After the talk about git and a constructive criticism phase, we moved on to the next topic about code reviews. We are all interested in or practicing with different tools, approaches and styles of code review, so we needed to get an overview. There is one company called SmartBear that has its public relationship moves done right by publishing an ebook about code reviews (Best Kept Secrets of Code Review). The one trick that really stands out is adding preliminary comments about the code from the original author to facilitate the reviewer’s experience. It’s like a pre-review of your own code.

We talked about different practices like the “30 minutes, no less” rule (I don’t seem to find the source, have to edit it in later, sorry!) and soon came to the most delicate point: the programmer’s ego. A review isn’t always as constructive as our criticism of the talk, so sometimes an ego will get bruised or just appear to be bruised. This is the moment emotions enter the room and make everything more complicated. The best thing to keep in mind and soul is the egoless programming manifesto and, while we are at it, the egoless code review. If everything fails, your process should put a website between the author and the reviewer.

That’s when tools make their appearance. You don’t need a specific tool for code reviews, but maybe they are helpful. Some tools dictate a certain workflow while others are more lenient. We concentrated on the non-opinionated tools out there. Of course, Review Ninja is the first tool that got mentioned. Several of our regular attendees worked on it already, some are working with it. There are some first generation tools like Barkeep or Review Board. Then, there’s the old gold league like Crucible. These tools feel a bit dated and expensive. A popular newcomer is Upsource, the code review tool from JetBrains. This is just a summary, but there are a lot of tools out there. Maybe one day, a third generation tool will take this market over like git did with version control.

Oh, and you can read all kind of aspects from reviewed code (but be sure to review the publishing date).

New university for IT professionals

In the german city of Köln (cologne), a new type of university is founded right now: https://code.university/ The concept includes a modern approach to teaching and learning. What’s really cool is that students work on their own projects from day one. That’s a lot like we started our company during our studies.

Various chatter

After that, we discussed a lot of topics that won’t make it into this summary. We drifted into ethics and social problems around IT. We explored some standards like the infamous ISO 26262 for functional safety. We laughed, chatted and generally had a good time.

Economics of software development

At last, we talked about statistical analysis and economic viewpoints of software development. That’s actually a very interesting topic if it were not largely about huge spreadsheets filled with numbers, printed on neverending pages referenced by endless lists of topics grouped by numerous chapters. Yes, you’ve already anticipated it, I’m talking about the books of Capers Jones. Don’t get me wrong, I really like them:

There a some others, but start with these two to get used to hard facts instead of easy tales. In the same light, you might enjoy the talk and work of Greg Wilson.

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.

Recap of the Schneide Dev Brunch 2016-04-10

If you couldn’t attend the Schneide Dev Brunch at 10th of April 2016, here is a summary of the main topics.

brunch64-borderedLast sunday, 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. In case you miss the recap article about the february brunch: It didn’t happen. We all took a break, but are on track again. So if you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. We were quite a lot of developers this time, so we had 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:

Why software development conferences?

We began with a curious question: Why are there even conferences about software development? You can read most of the content for free on the internet and even watch the talks afterwards. So why attend one for a lot of money? We discussed the topic a bit and came up with an analysis:
There are (at least) four different interested groups in a conference:

  • The organizer or commercial host is mostly interested in a positive revenue. As long as there’s a possibility for some net gain, somebody will host a conference. The actual topic is a secondary matter for them (this might explain some of the weirder conferences out there, like the boring conference).
  • The developers that really attend a conference are a small subset of all developers. They all have their own personal motives to pay money and invest time and inconviences to be there in person. Some might rely on the quality filter of a conference board, some are looking forward to meet their peers in an annual ritual. There might be those that can learn best if somebody talk-feeds them the topic. Whatever reason, a lot of developers enjoy participating at conferences. If it happens to be paid by the employer and booked as worktime, who would not?
  • Then there are the speakers. They have the additional burden to convince a committee of their topic, prepare a talk of high quality and be able to perform on stage (something that is harder than it looks). The speakers seek reputation and credible proof of expertise. His resume will probably profit, too.
  • And at last, the companies that sponsor the conference, maintain a booth with big roll-ups and smiling employees and give their developers a chance to attend are in the game to represent, to recruit and build their brand. A lot of traditional marketing effort goes into trade fairs, so why not treat the developer market like any other and be present in the developer fairs?

We can conclude that software development conferences can provide value for every associated stakeholder. As long as this sentence holds true, conferences will be held.
The question didn’t came out of the blue: one of our attendees got accepted as a speaker on the Karlsruher Entwicklertag 2016 and wanted to learn about the different expectations he needs to address. He will give his talk on the next Dev Brunch to practice the flow and to pass the hardest critics. The topic: git internals. We are thrilled!

Stratagems and strategies

The next topic contained another talk, not at a conference, but in the context of a “general topics” series at a local university (the Duale Hochschule in Karlsruhe). The talk introduces the concept of the 36 stratagems and of modern strategies to the audience. We talked a bit about the concept itself and found that the list of logical fallacies is somewhat similar. We even found an application of the stratagems in local history (sorry, only german source found): The Bretten’s Hundle
The talk itself is this monday, so you’ll need to hurry if you want to attend.

Psychology of deception

As often during the dev brunch, one topic led to the other, and we soon talked about morale and ethics. The concept of micro-expressions to reveal the hidden agenda of others came up, as well as the TV series “lie to me” that is inspired by the work of Paul Ekman, a professor of psychology. There even is a commercial training program to improve your skill of “spotting the liar”.

Games with morale aspects

Well, we are nerds. While crime investigation is thrilling, there is the even more enthralling topic of games with psychological and moralistic aspects. We soon exchanged our experiences with games like “Haze” or “Spec Ops: The Line”. But it doesn’t stop at shooter games, you can have similar insights by playing “Papers, Please” (a strong favorite for one of our next Schneide game nights) or “This War Of Mine”. You can even try some multiplayer games specifically designed for social insights, like “The Ship: Murder Party”.
And if you haven’t got much time but still want to learn something about yourself, little games like “60 Seconds!” are a great start.
This topic lead to some ideas for upcoming Schneide game nights in 2016.

Book review: A tour of C++

One attendee of the brunch provided a summary of the book “A Tour of C++” from Bjarne Stroustrup, that recently got updated to the language possibilities of C++ 11. In his words, the book is a rather incomplete introduction to the language, with way too many aspects described in a way too short manner. It’s more of a reading list to really grasp the concepts, so it may serve as a source of inspiration. For example, the notion of “move semantics” was explained, but to discover the consequences is up to the developer. The part about template programming was well done and every chapter has a suitable list of advices in the tradition of “Effective XYZ” at the end. So it’s not a bad book, but too short to be satisfying. It’s like a tourist’s tour around C++ 11, so the title holds its promise.

The left-pad incident

When we finished the “official” agenda, the topic of the recent left-pad incident came up and left us laughing. We really live in glorious times when the happiness of the (Javascript) world depends on a few lines of code. Not that this couldn’t happen in any other ecosystem.

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.

Recap of the Schneide Dev Brunch 2015-12-13

If you couldn’t attend the Schneide Dev Brunch at 13th of December 2015, here is a summary of the main topics.

brunch64-borderedTwo weeks 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 small this time, but with 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:

Company strategies

Our first topic was about the changes that happen in company culture once a certain threshold is overstepped. The founders lose touch with their own groundwork and then with their own employees. Compliance frameworks are installed and then enforced, even if the rules make no sense in specific cases. A new hierarchy layer, the middle management, springs into existence and is populated by people that never worked on the topic but make all the decisions. The brightest engineers are promoted to a management position and find themselves helpless and overburdened. Adopting a new technology or tool takes forever now. The whole company stalls technologically.

Sounds familiar? We discussed several cases of this dramaturgy and some ways around it. One possible remedy is to never grow big enough. Stay small, stay fast and stay agile. That’s the Schneide way.

Code analysis with jDeodorant

We devoted a lot of time on getting to know jDeodorant, an eclipse-based code smell detection tool for Java. We grabbed a real project and analyzed it with the tool. Well, this step alone took its time, because the plugin cannot be operated in an intuitive manner. It presents itself as a collection of student thesis work without overarching narrative and a clear disregard of expectation conformity. If several experienced eclipse users cannot figure out how a tool works despite having used similar tools for years, something is afoul. We got past the bad user experience by viewing several screencasts, the most noteworthy being a plain feature demonstration.

Once you figure out the handling, the tool helps you to find code smells or refactoring opportunities. In our case, most of the findings were false alarms or overly picky. But in two cases, the tool provided a clear hint on how to make the code better (both being feature envies). If the project would really benefit from the proposed refactorings is subject for discussion. The tool acts like a very assiduous colleague in a code review when every improvement gets rewarded.

We really don’t know how to rate this tool. It’s hard to learn and provides little value on first sight, but might be useful on larger legacy code bases. We’ll keep it at the back of our minds.

Naming and syntax rules

During the discussion about jDeodorant, we talked about naming schemes and other syntax rules. We remembered horrific conventions like prefixed I and E or suffixed Exception. The last one got some curious looks, because it’s still a convention in the Java SDK and some names won’t make it without, like the beloved IOException. But what about the NullPointerException? Wouldn’t NullPointer describe the problem just as good? Kevlin Henney already talked about this and other ineffective coding habits (if you have audio degradation halfway through, try another video of the talk). It’s a good eye-opener to (some of) the habits we’ve adopted without questioning them. But challenging the status quo is a good thing if done in reasonable doses and with a constructive attitude.

Unit testing

When we played around with jDeodorant and surfed the code of the project that served as our testing ground, the Infinitest widget raised some questions. So we talked about Continuous Testing, unit tests and some pitfalls if your tests aren’t blazing fast. The eclipse plugin for MoreUnit was mentioned soon. Those two plugins really make a difference in working with tests. Especially the unannounced shortcut Ctrl+J is very helpful. I’ve even blogged about the topic back in 2011.

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.

Recap of the Schneide Dev Brunch 2015-08-09

If you couldn’t attend the Schneide Dev Brunch at 9th of August 2015, here is a summary of the main topics.

brunch64-borderedTwo weeks 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 well attented this time with 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:

News on Docker

Docker is the hottest topic among developers and operators in 2015. No wonder we started chatting about it the minute we sat down. There are currently two interesting platform projects that provide runtime services for docker: Tutum (commercial) and Rancher (open source). We all noted the names and will check them out. The next interesting fact was that Docker is programmed in the Go language. The team probably one day decided to give it a go.

Air Conditioning

We all experienced the hot spell this summer and observed that work in the traditional sense is impossible beyond 30° Celsius. Why there are still so few air conditioned offices in our region is beyond our grasp. Especially since it’s possible to power the air condition system with green electricity and let sun-power deal with the problem that, well, the sun brought us. In 2015 alone, there are at minimum two work weeks lost to the heat. The productivity gain from cooling should outweigh the costs.

License Management

We talked about how different organisations deal with the challenge of software license management. Nearly every big company has a tool that does essentially the same license management but has its own cool name. Other than that, bad license management is such a great productivity killer that even air conditioning wouldn’t offset it.

Windows 10

Even if we are largely operation system agnostic, the release of Windows 10 is hot news. A few of our participants already tried it and concluded that “it’s another Windows”. A rather confusing aspect is the split system settings. And you have to abdicate the Cortana assistant if you want to avoid the data gathering.

Patch Management

A rather depressing topic was the discussion about security patches. I just repeat two highlights: A substantial number of servers on the internet are still vulnerable to the heartbleed attack. And if a car manufacturer starts a big recall campaign with cost-free replacements, less than 10 percent of the entitled cars are actually fixed on average. These explicitely includes safety-critical issues. That shouldn’t excuse us as an industry for our own shortcomings and it’s not reassuring to see that other industries face the same problems.

Self-Driving Cars

We disgressed on the future hype topic of self-driving cars. I can’t reiterate the complete discussion, but we agreed that those cars will hit the streets within the next ten years. The first use case will be freight transports, because the cargo doesn’t mind if the driver is absent and efficiency matters a lot in logistics. Plus, machines don’t need breaks. Ok, those were enough puns on the topic. Sorry.

Tests on Interfaces

An interesting question was how to build tests that can ensure a class or interface contract. Much like regression tests for recently broken functionality, compatibility tests should deal with backward compatibility issues in the interface. Turns out, the Eclipse foundation gave the topic some thoughts and came up with an exhaustive list of aspects to check. There are even some tools that might come in handy if you want to compare two versions of an API.

API Design

When the topic of API Design came up, some veterans of the Schneide Events immediately mentioned the API Design Fest we held in November 2013 to get our noses bloody on API design. Well, bleed we did. The most important take-away from the Fest was that if you plan to publish an API that can endure some years in production while being enhanced and improved, you just shouldn’t do it. Really, don’t do it, it’s probably a bad idea and you lack the required skill without even knowing it. If you want to know, participate or even host an API Design Fest.

And if you happen to design a web-based API, you might abandon backward compatibility by offering several distinct “versions” of APIs of a service. The version is included in the API URL, and acts more like a name than a version. This will ease your burden a bit. A nice reference resource might also be the PayPal API style guide.

Let’s just agree that API design is really hard and should not be done until it’s clear you don’t suffer from Dunning-Kruger effect symptoms too much.

Performance Tests

We talked about the most effective setup of performance tests. There were a lot of ideas and we cornerstoned the topic around this:

  • There was a nearly heroic effort from the Eclipse development team to measure their IDE performance, especially to compare different versions of the IDE. The Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) was (as in: discontinued) a toolkit of interesting approaches to the topic. The IDE itself was measured by performance fingerprints like this example from 2011. As far as we know, all those things ceased to exist.
  • At the last Java Forum Stuttgart, there was a talk about performance testing from an experienced tester that loved to give specific advice. The slides can be viewed online in german language (well, not really, but the talk was).
  • The book Release It! has a lot of insights to this topic. It’s one of the bigger books on the pragmatic bookshelf.
  • The engineers at NetFlix actually did a lot of thinking about the topic. They came up with Hystrix, a resilience library, aimed to make it easier to prevent complete system blackouts. They also came up with Chaos Monkey, a service that makes it easier to have a complete system blackout. If we can say anything about NetFlix, it is that they definitely approach their problems from the right angle.

Company Culture

Leaking over from the previous topic about effective performance-related measures, we talked about different company cultures, especially in regard to a centralized human resources departments and works council (german: Betriebsrat). We agreed that it is very difficult to maintain a certain culture and continued growth. We also agreed that culture trickles down from top management.

OpenGL

The last topic on this Dev Brunch was about the rendering of text or single characters in OpenGL. By using signed distance fields, you can render text more crisp and still only use cheap computation instructions. There is a paper from Valve on the topic that highlights the benefits and gives a list of additional reading. It’s always cool to learn about something simple that actually improves things.

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.