Inspired by post “Min/max note taking for conferences” I’ve noted down my impressions, most interesting sentences, mentioned tools/books/blogs during ongoing GeeCON 2014 conference. This is my ”Brain dump” after Day 1.
Pavel Sekanina – Nothing comes for free
- Be yourself, be true. It makes everything much easier.
- Your colleagues do not have to like you, but they should appreciate you for your skills, attitude and professionalism.
Jurgen Appelo – The 7 Duties of Great Software Professionals
- Won Entrepreneur of the Year 1999 in Holland – details in Dutch (Google Translate for English version)
- recommended book “Drive”
- Measure how you spend time to find ways where you can optimise things
- There is ALE 2014 Unconference in Cracow in August, looking very interesting
- “Actually be cool instead of saying everyone ‘we are cool’”
- We tend to anticipate too much, what if, what will happen when… We should explore more things
- Time management: attach what is useful with what is pleasurable
- Time management: try to set aside a little bit of time each day
Jakub Jurkiewicz – Back to the Future – how to go back in time and provide better future for your agile team
- very often forgotten point of retrospectives: “reflect how to become more effective”
- ice breakers: Factor fiction game – everyone tells three (2 true, 1 false) sentences about himself and let other team members try to guess
- Worth to read and try: 40 Icebreakers for Small Groups
- Very important rule “Do not leave the retrospective room without saying what you wanted to say”
- Gather data about specific topics. e.g. how people perceive communication inside of the team, quality of the job, etc. and then check how this indicators are changing when you compare them with results from the retrospectives in the past
- Give people space and time to share appreciations. Allow them to give “kudos” to others.
- Decide what to do, write down action points.
- Action points should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, Time-related
- Do retrospective about how this retrospective went. What was ok, what needs improvement.
- Interesting tool for remote retros: http://www.ideaboardz.com/
- Books to check: “Agile retrospectives”, “Project retrospectives”
Patroklos Papapetrou – Managing your Technical Debt with SonarQube
- Code quality – how fast developers can add business value to the system
Adam Warski – Keep it Simple with Scala
- Scala Async – readable lib to write asynchronous code
- Spray.io – Akka based REST library in Scala with readable DSL
- Over heard during this talk: Spock is very cool, but what I miss in it is type safety. ScalaTest is much better when you refactor stuff.
- Macwire – simple, non-invasive DI for Scala
Tim Boudreau – Node.js for Java developers
- speaker webpage to check – http://timboudreau.com/
- hapi – rich framework for building web applications and services for Node.js
- joi – library to JSON validation
Olga Madejska – ‘I will never deploy on Fridays’ – yeah, right…
- Show your drafts/unfinished work as soon as it is possible. The quicker feedback the better final result will be.
- Treat project as something that you will have to work with till the end of your life. Do not cut corners.
- “Every manual task that can be forgotten, will be forgotten” –> automate everything
That’s all about Day 1. Other days should appear within next week.
And what about your GeeCON?
What about you? Did you find anything very interesting during GeeCON? Or maybe I’ve missed really interesting talk on Day 1?
