I thought it would be good to write down a few of my thoughts from CodeMash before I forget about it. There’s certainly more that impacted me, but something is better than nothing.

Pre-Compiler: Test Driven Development: From Concept to Deployment by Leon Gersing

Leon did a great job of somehow getting 50 people in the room to contribute to the same project. I was also amazed that the same number of people were able to share “what they did yesterday, what they are going to do today, and any blockers” in under 15 minutes. It was actually closer to 8 minutes on a few of the stand-ups.

I came away with some more GIT experience and a better idea of how to run an agile team. I liked the idea of starting from story cards and decomposing them into tasks and then allowing them to be spread out amongst the crowd. The one thing that was a little haphazard was the coordination of connected tasks.

The Not-GIT Talk by Jim Weirich

Jim is definitely one of my A-List speakers. He always prepares so well, knows his stuff, but also knows how to communicate it so dummies like me can understand it. I loved the way that he built up a so-called source control system from scratch (conceptually), solving problems along the way. This is top-of-the-line material. Oh, and you can see his presentation at the Pragmatic Programmer’s store in a screencast format.

NoSQL: Death to Relational Databases by Ben Scofield

There are a lot of non-relational databases. Need to explore them on my own to discover pros and cons of when they are beneficial and non-beneficial.

Ben encouraged us to start with a non-relational database from the beginning of a project to see how you would do things differently. He also mentioned the idea of polyglot persistence, that is having many different storage means for different purposes. This could be an interesting idea to explore as well

The Five Habits of Successful Lean Development by Mary Poppendieck

Purpose, Passion, Persistence, Pride, Profit

Mary gave a lot of examples of how these P’s play out. Persistence stuck out to me the most. She asked the question “What makes people really good at what they do?” The answer she gave was deliberate practice, and expert performance over a long period of time (10 years or 10,000 hours). This corroborates what Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Outliers.

1. Identify a specific skill that needs improvement
2. Devise (or learn from a teacher) a focused exercise designed to improve the skill
3. Practice repeatedly
4. Obtain immediate feedback immediately and adjust accordingly
5. Focus on pushing the limits and expect repeated failures
6. Practice regularly and intensely, perhaps three hours a day.

User Stories: Closing the Agile Loop by Barry Hawkins

You’ll never be as ignorant while building software about what is required for a project then when you negotiate the contract of what is in scope.

Treat a User Story as a placeholder for interaction, not a substitute for interaction. Here’s how User Stories differ from a Use Case.

• Smaller in Scope
• Not permanent artifacts
• Too brief to stuff with UI requirements
• Focus on functionality
• Facilitate iteration planning
• Analysis catalyst, not an analysis product

A User Story follows a format such as

Description of what’s needed

As a ________ User, (who is doing the action)
I want to ___________ (what do they want to do)
so that ______________. (to clarify the purpose and business value)

Conditions of Success (Acceptance criteria)

Scenario: _________
Given _____________
When I ____________
Then _____________