conference

These are my notes on a presentation and round table discussion held by Tim Ottinger at SoCraTes UK 2023.

Tim Ottinger contributed to the book “Clean Code” book, published in 2008. Now, 15 years later he wants to revisit it and give the term “readability” a new definition:

These are the notes I took during the sessions. Some of them don’t have a clear structure, but are individual, unconnected ideas.

My notes from MenderCon 2021, an open space conference on modernizing and improving existing codebases.

“The Legacy of SoCraTes” is a virtual conference with talks on testing and legacy code. You can find all the talks of the 3rd edition in the YouTube playlist for the conference.

This article is a summary of some talks.

In June I attended JS Nation Live, an online conference on JavaScript. I took notes during most of the events and added some opinions and lots of links afterwards.

My notes from some of the sessions I attended.

My notes from some of the sessions I attended, from hallway conversations and the schedule.

Here are my notes from some of the talks I attended.

Here are my notes from some of the sessions I attended.

Keynote by David Snowden An inspiring talk about complexity and modeling, using the Cynefin framework to understand the nature of your domain (Complex/Complicated/Simple/Chaotic) and how to model and measure success according to that nature. What stood out to me was the idea that complex domains - like ecosystems, financial markets, large organizations or even “society” itself - can’t be analyzed and fully understood like complicated domains. Thus, they can’t be “modeled”, since every abstraction will miss crucial behavior.

I attended the SoCraTes Day Berlin and came back inspired and full of ideas I want to share with the world. Lean Coffee We discussed estimations (Complexity vs time, who needs them, when are they helping) and I learned about the method of “Magic estimation”. Someone mentioned “Scripts to rule them all”, an attempt to establish a common set of scripts in each project that do certain project tasks like bootstrapping, resetting, updating, running the CI validation, etc.

I attended SoCraTes 2017 in Soltau. SoCraTes is an “Unconference”, where the participants set their own agenda and come up with topics for their sessions. Sessions can be presentations, workshops and open discussions. Here are the notes from some of the sessions I attended: Programming Exercise: Banishing State The example of this exercise was taken from a real-life project: A book indexing service that takes keyword/page number pairs as input and outputs either the page number, a range of page numbers or nothing, depending on previous inputs.

I attended the Wikimedia Hackathon 2017 in Vienna. This is a summary and review of what I learned there while working on the prototype of the “Advanced Search Form” extension for MediaWiki. The first hurdle for working on the feature was setting up a MediaWiki environment. The recommended way is the Vagrant environment, but I’ve had bad experiences with that in the past and did not want do download tons of stuff over the conference WiFi.

Here are the bits and pieces I learned from the talks I attended at the second day of JSConf 2017 in Berlin: Applying NASA coding standards to JavaScript “Would you fly in a plane with an HTML and JavaScript instrument panel?” was the question Denis Radin asked at the beginning of the talk. While he is hopeful that improving the overall quality of JavaScript code may lead some day to the browser being the “universal GUI”, I remain skeptical for aviation, space exploration and other mission-critical systems that need real-time performance characteristics and high fault tolerance.

Here are the bits and pieces I learned from the talks I attended at the first day of JSConf 2017 in Berlin: What’s new in Netscape Navigator 2.0 Marcin Szczepanski tried to build the TodoMVC app with the first JavaScript implementation that was available - in Netscape Navigator 2.0. There was no DOM to manipulate, you could only call document.write during the render call. What he came up with, was an application architecture based on HTML framesets with a “parent frame” that holds the application state and child frames that are re-loaded and thus re-rendered with the current state whenever an event occurs.

I attended the SwanseaCon 2016, a conference about Agile Development & Software Craftsmanship. I enjoyed most of the talks and took some notes for the most interesting stuff: My two favorite talks Immutable architecture “Your servers are not your pets” - don’t give them names, don’t tend to them with complex state-based configuration management software like Puppet and Chef, don’t get emotionally attached. Just build the environment you need using simple tools like Ansible, deploy the code to it, put it behind your load balancer and throw the old one away.