Calle Arnesten’s Blog

Friday night I came home from Öredev, a 3 day conference in Malmö. Overall, a great experience which has made me and the team I work with inspired.

The following are the most interesting experiences that I will take with me:

• The Power of Value by Dan Bergh Johnsson. One of the best sessions of Öredev. An eye-opener for what value objects can do. A value object is an immutable object where you are not interested in tracking its identity. I will now begin to think more of this when developing.
• Agile Architecture by James Coplien. James Coplien was a strange and arrogant person, for example claiming that he was 1 of 15 in the world who really understood object-orientation. But his ideas how architecture should be was really, really interesting. I think he is on to something with his gluing of Methodful Roles, Identifiers and Methodless Roles onto simple classes. Will definitely need to study this more as I only got a vague understanding of it.
• Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. Uncle Bob (as he is also called) made two inspiring talks: the keynote and Clean Code III. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing him before at JAOO 2007, but despite that got more tips for writing good code. The rest of the team I work with, were also inspired, so we will try to enforce a clean code policy at work.
• The Pomodoro Technique by Staffan Nöteberg. Staffan was a good speaker, using dolls and hats to make the speech fun. The Pomodoro technique is a process for improving one’s personal work. It’s main idea is to only be allowed to focus on one thing at a time. Will try this soon, both at work and at home.
• The Lean thinking. Lean was mentioned by many speakers, Scott Bellware and James Coplien for example. It seems to be the new buzzword. I need to check up more on this, but I think I got the basic idea of it at least. Which is produce more value and eliminate waste.
• Behaviour Driven Design. Got some ideas in this area from various sessions. MSpec as a framework looks interesting, especially the HTML-reports it can generate. AutoHotkey seems like a good utility for writing underscores more efficiently. Will start to use BDD-style both at work and at home.
• T-person. Was mentioned by Scott Bellware. It basically is a person which is good at other things than his main speciality. Like a developer that also is skilled at design and testing. Then he can help in both of those areas if needed and also his understanding will make hand-offs smoother.
• Design Debt. Got a good scetch model to illustrate how design debt works for people that don’t understand it (like managers).

I learned many more things during the conference, but I have to stop now. Probably there will be more posts later on as I try out some of the new ideas I’ve got.