CodeCamp #10 [InTENsity] – see you at my presentations

Note: Please forward this information to anyone who is interested.

The next CodeCamp #10 will be held in Waltham, MA on weekend September 20^th and 21^st.

For more information check Chris Bowen’s post.

Currently there are 33 submitted (and growing number of) presentations.

I’ll be presenting the “Toolbox for Agile Projects and Developers” and will be covering the topics like:

• Agile Development Practices
• TDD ( Test Driven Development)
• Unit Testing
• Mocking
• IOC / DI (Inversion of Control / Dependency Injection)
• ORM (Object Relational Mapping)
• Code Coverage
• Source Control
• etc …

It appears that the amount of information is enormous, so I’ve decided to split these topics into 2 separate presentations.

See you all there …

Alt.Net Canada – Wish I was there!

Bil Simser has done a terrific job of capturing the Alt.Net Canada event, it’s vibe and content. I wish more events will be captured. I, personally, will do everything in my power to make more events to be available for the people to see.

ALT.NET Canada – Day 1 – Immersion

ALT.NET Canada – Day 2 – DDD and more D

ALT.NET Canada – Day 2 – Noah, build me an Ark!

ALT.NET Canada – Day 3 – Coupling and Decoupling your Applications

ALT.NET Canada – Day 3 – Frameworks Fishbowl

ALT.NET Canada – Day 3 – The Sharing Circle

Summer of NHibernate Screencast Series

Pretty valuable resource for those who decides to take a look at NHibernate – Summer of NHibernate Screencast Series.

These series cover most of what you need to know about NHibernate, beginning from configuration, mapping, through querying and to very advanced issues, like interceptors.

Take a look.

Toolbox for Agile Projects and Developers @ Hartford, CT

It was Hartford’s first CodeCamp. I think it was a great success – way to go, Hartford! More to come!

My presentation had a solid attendance and people stayed until the very end. At the end I’ve ran out of time and haven’t had a time to cover in details the Inversion-of-Control and Dependency Injection tools, but, I think, I’ll prepare a separate talk only on this topic – it’s huge and requires a lot of detailed attention.

 

As I’ve promised, I’m publishing the slide deck as well as all the code iterations for you to have some fun:

 

Iteration	Introduced	Link
—	Slide deck	link
0	Base solution	link
1	Unit testing	link
2	Source Control & Continuous Integration (CI)	link
3	Mocking, Refactoring	link
4	IOC (Inversion-of-Control) & DI (Dependency Injection)	link

 

Please feel free to contact me for more information or leave your comments on the blog. I’m available to present this topic or any other portion of it in more details on your site – let me know.

Are coding monkeys valuable?

Recently I’ve had a corridor talk with one of my colleagues about the required skills of the engineers to be hired. My personal opinion that in order to be successful I’d like to see the new engineers to always improve their knowledge and proficiency. This should include:

• reading technology-related blogs
• looking for new technologies
• learning tools and the environments they are working with/in more in depth to better understand their capabilities
• thinking of the ways to improve the current solutions (you’ll be amazed by how many things can be better with almost minimal changes)

On the other hand I’ll agree that the other kind of people is very valuable, they even create a strong back-bone of each company: down-to-earth coders. They do not invent things, don’t change anything, follow the processes to the dot and execute what they were told to do. No discussion there – they are very valuable, but…

The main question is: what kind of group you’d like to work with? what people you’d like to surround yourself with? how flexible and agile you want your environment to be?

I don’t think that you’ll want to work with an architect-level person that can tell to your face without any hesitation or remorse: I don’t know anything about the latest methodologies and technologies, I’m not a geek, I’m successful, so why the new people we hire should learn this new stuff.

SOSA – Spaghetti-oriented Service Architecture

Just saw the Jim Webber’s presentation on "Guerilla SOA" – this is the must-see presentation for all the people that are working with the distributed services.

In my opinion I’d like to get rid of the SOA abbreviation – it’s an overloaded paradigm that is overused and abused. This is what you need to know if you build service-based products:

1. Talk to the business people – they are your main source in understanding the data flow
2. Make the interfaces as simple as possible (don’t overdesign)
3. Make the communication as simple as possible (for example: WCF – this allows you to take the transport decisions out of your code and will allow the IT to decide how the communication will happen)
4. ESB and BizTalk are great to access different services and data, but only behind your own service. Don’t expose these technologies to the enterprise – you’ll have to deal with all these complexities at every step of your business process. You don’t want that.