Last sunday, we held our Dev Brunch for May 2010. It was a small group of developers brunching together this time. One reason was a communication failure on my part, as a crucial email announcing a change in the appointment didn’t reach everyone interested in participating. Sorry for this one again! The other reason was more of a pleasure: Two of our regular brunch attendees are turning into parents. But a core group brunched and talked in the office roof garden, discussing the topics listed below.
The Dev Brunch
If you want to know more about the meaning of the term “Dev Brunch” or how we implement it, have a look at the follow-up posting of the brunch in October 2009. We continue to allow presence over topics. Our topics for the brunch were:
- Options in Scala – If you are used to traditional programming languages like Java, you might be surprised that you can’t nullify a reference in Scala. There is no concept of “null” in Scala, therefore avoiding the so-called billion dollar mistake (you might want to listen to the guy who invented the mistake, too). If you want to use “uncertain” references, you should look into the Option type of Scala, which was the main topic of this talk. With some code examples, this was a decent introduction into the concept.
- Summary of the Sensor+Test trade fair – This talk was a short report of the recently visited german Sensor+Test measurement fair in Nuremburg. Details may follow on this blog, but the overall summary is that the measurement industry in Germany and neighbours is mostly self-confident and down-to-earth.
- The Modbus protocol – This talk was a short introduction to the ancient (but still useful) Modbus protocol and the possibilities to access it in Java. There are at least two projects that provide full coverage of the protocol: jamod and modbus4j. The protocol itself is rather low-level, but sufficient for simple control and data query tasks on an embedded device. The possibility to be mostly agnostic over the physical transport layer is a strength of the Modbus protocol and its implementations.
- Usage patterns for mocks – Most of us had to confess: we are mockists. But there are many different flavors of using mocks in tests. Inspired by the book “Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests”, this talk was an open discussion round about personal mock usage preferences.
As usual, the topics ranged from first-hand experiences and impressions to literature reviews and research. For additional information provided by the talk authors, check out the comment section (or leave a comment to request further content). Comments and resources might be in german language.
Retrospection of the brunch
The usual brunch setup is nearly perfect. What was lacking this time was the coordination of the appointment. To further improve on that point, we introduced a new mailing list, containing everone that is currently interested in participating the brunch.
Schneide Blog 