Coding Is Like Cooking

At XP2011 we introduced a new kind of presentation – the tech demo. The idea was to give people 30 minutes to demonstrate a new tool or technique. For example, some people performed code katas in diverse languages, and others showed various productivity-boosting frameworks.

For XP2012 we want to continue with these kinds of demos, but with an additional rule. You can’t touch the keyboard yourself when you present. We want you to co-present with someone else, drawn from the audience, who will do the typing and demonstrate the tool or technique. Your job is to coach them into doing the demo you’ve planned, and to explain to everyone what’s going on.

Your co-presenter could be someone drawn from the audience who you’ve never met before. You’ll have to expertly coach them into demonstrating what you aim to show to the rest of the audience. If you choose this route, it will certainly be a big test of your skills of coaching and pedagogy.

Alternatively you can come to the conference and find a volunteer in advance of the presentation. You could make time for a practice run or two before the presentation. Again, you’ll be showing not only your tool or techique, but also how easy it is for a good programmer to learn.

If you’re thinking this sounds like an awfly scary way to do a demo, then you may be right. We think it’s also a very good way to have demos that engage the audience and really show off what you’re capable of.

If you know someone else who’ll be at the conference you could of course prepare the demo with them well in advance. You’d be able to work out exactly what pitfalls they will fall into, and have a slick commentary ready. Just having one person typing and the other talking is a great advantage in a demo, and this would probably still be good to watch. It might not be quite as challenging though 🙂

Will you accept the XP2012 Tech Demo challenge?

The Call for Papers for XP2012 is currently open, and this year we’re doing things a little differently*. I’m one of the co-chairs responsible for programme design, and also involved in reviewing session proposals. (You might be interested in my post about XP2011, which I was also involved in organizing)

Most proposals are going through what will hopefully be a more transparent, agile and effective review process than we’ve had in the past. The idea is that everyone sends in a first draft proposal, and then receives feedback from reviewers who want to help them to improve and refine their ideas. When everyone has had a chance to act on this feedback, the review committee will select the proposals that will be put on the programme for the conference.

More information, dates and benefits of speaking are listed on the conference website. My next two posts contain more information about a couple of the session types we’re looking for: Tech Demos
and the Team Challenge.

*Academic papers have a separate review track, and proceed much as they have done previously. The demands of academic rigour and peer review mean we won’t change a formula that clearly works for this kind of submission. See the call for research papers.

I’ve never been to Öredev before, and it really is a very impressive conference. Gathered in Malmö right now, is over a thousand developers, with a collection of speakers representing the elite of the global software development industry. The sessions are overflowing with a plethora of great advice, news and inspiration. That’s primarily why I’m here, although I could also praise the excellent conference organization, food, live music, sponsor giveaways and other entertainments.

I’d like to talk about my first impressions of the conference. As with other software conferences I’ve been too, women are rather unusual here, both among delegates and speakers. I’ve blogged about this before, and it’s not untypical. The sad fact is that the proportion of women is low, and, unlike in other industries, actually falling in software development.

I’d just like to relate two experiences I had yesterday.

Women speakers
I’m here as an ordinary delegate at this conference, but at most conferences I go to, I’m a speaker. I was really happy to be greeted yesterday by Dan North, Gojko Adzic, Pat Kua, Corey Haines and others, since they’re people who I really respect. I’ve mostly got to know them when we’ve spoken at the same conferences in the past. Of course they all asked me which day I was speaking on at Öredev. Well, the easy answer is that I was not asked to speak here. I looked on the Öredev conference website and there was no call for submissions, unlike other conferences I have spoken at like XP, Agile Testing Days, ScanDev, Agile, JFokus etc. I assumed that it was invitation only, and the track chairs would mail me if they were interested in having me speak. Now I realize that I should have mailed them to point out I wanted to speak here.

I think I just fell into this trap that women apparently often fall into, described in this article I read this week: “Four Ways Women Stunt Their Careers Unintentionally“. Apparently we tend to be “overly modest” and “women fail to get promoted because they fail to step up and apply”. So I didn’t apply, and I didn’t get a job to speak at Öredev. #kickingmyself

Neal Ford’s keynote
I listened to a keynote by Neal Ford yesterday. I’ve heard him speak before, and he is always very entertaining and yet makes some interesting points about software. It’s just a small thing he said that really bothered me. A keynote speech is supposed to set the tone for a whole conference – you have the everybody gathered, and you’re supposed to say something inspirational and thought provoking.

One of Neal’s jokes was about some obscure Star Trek reference that I didn’t get (although from the audience reaction I’m guessing most others did), that he followed up with a slide showing the top Google image results when you searched for this thing. He made some comment about google knowing that when you search for this, you’re really asking for porn. He had helpfully airbrushed out the image results so you could only vaguely see the outline of naked women.

Neal, you really didn’t need to do that. Your talk had enough fun stuff in it without alienating me with science fiction references and disguised porn.

Looking forward
There are two more days of the main conference, and plenty more good stuff on the programme. I’ve spotted a session called “geek feminism” in the “extra” track. I’ve never thought of myself as a geek feminist, but maybe I am. Having had the experiences described above, I think I’ll go along and find out.

This is the second time I’ve attended Nordic Ruby, you can read about what I thought last year here. This year I enjoyed the conference more, for several reasons. There were some small changes in the way it was organized, (on a Friday and Saturday instead of taking up a whole weekend), a better choice of speakers and topics, (less technical, more inspirational), and I knew more of the people there.

One of the themes of the conference was diversity, which I was very, very happy to see. There was an inspiring talk by Joshua Wehner about this topic, taking up some depressing statistics about the IT industry in general and open source software in particular. What struck me most was that he said the statistics for women involvement are improving in many formerly male-dominated disciplines, like maths, physics and law, but in computing, the situation was actually better 20 years ago than it is now. The curves are pointing the wrong way in our industry.

Having said that, there were slightly more women at the conference this year than last, I think I counted 4 of 150, compared with 2 of 90 last year. There were also far fewer references to science fiction movies from the speakers this year 😉

Joshua did take up several things that we could do practically to reduce bias and positively encourage diversity. He’s written about some of them in this blog post. Another one he mentioned that I liked was the “no asshole rule”. If people engage in arrogant one-upmanship, talk down to others, and emphasize their superior programming abilities, they should be regarded as not just annoying, but actually incompetent. Developing software is a multi-faceted skill, and it takes a lot more than just writing good code to be a good software developer.

Joe O’Brien continued the diversity theme in his talk “Taking back education” by basically arguing that having a degree in computer science correlates very badly with being a good software developer, and that we should be finding ways to bring people into our industry who have non-traditional backgrounds. He advocated companies to start apprenticeship programmes, while conceding that this model of education doesn’t scale very well. He talked about getting a group of companies together to set up a “code school”. He said “forget universities when it comes to education [of software developers]. We’re better at it”

I applaud his efforts to bring a more diverse range of people into the industry, and I think my recent experiences teaching a group like this are relevant. I think I’ll write a separate blog post about that experience, but basically I think the idea of a “code school” is a good one, and similar institutions probably already exist, and could add a course in software development to their programme of courses in practical skills. For this to happen it’s up to companies to put in time and energy setting them up, rather than just complaining that when they put out a job advert, all they get are white male applicants between the ages of 25-35, so it’s not their fault.

Another talk that deserves a mention is the one by Joseph Wilk. He spoke about “The Limited Red Society” which is an idea that Joshua Kerievsky came up with. I heard Joshua speak about it at XP2009, and I thought Joseph did a very good job of explaining what it is, and why it’s important.

Basically the idea is that although you need your tests to go red during TDD, if they stay red for any length of time, it can get you into trouble. While they are red, you can’t check in, ship your code, or change to working on a different task. This is one motivation for trying to measure, and limit, how much of the time your tests are red. It’s also about more generally improving the feedback we get for ourselves while we work. Professional sports stars spend time analysing and visualizing their performances (where balls land on a tennis court, footballers rates of passing etc). We programmers could benefit from that kind of thing too.

Joseph has invented a tool that helps him to track his state when doing TDD. It’s a simple monitoring program that makes a note every time he runs his tests. It’s not as elaborate as the commercial tool offered by Joshua Kerievsky’s company, but it does work with Ruby and Cucumber. Joseph also has his tool connected to his CI server so that it runs tests that have failed recently in his and others’ checkouts first in the CI test run. He also gathers statistics about individual tests, how often they fail, and whether they are fixed without the production code needing to be changed – a way of spotting fragile tests.

I think this kind of statistics gathering is really interesting and I think Joseph will just have more insights to share as he gathers more data and does more analysis. I’ve been experimenting with the tool provided by codersdojo.org for measuring my performance at code katas, but Joseph seems to be taking this all to the next level.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed Nordic Ruby. (I still think it would be improved by some actual open space sessions though). I talked to loads of really interesting people, enjoyed good food and drink in comfortable surroundings, and listened to some people give excellent talks. Thanks for organizing a great conference, Elabs.

The programme for DynCon has just been published, and the whole conference is about dynamically typed languages. There are talks about all sorts of languages, old and new, and I think it’s going to be really interesting to get people together from all these different communities. I’m giving a talk with title “A Test-Driven Introduction to Python” where I’m hoping to show off some of the best features of Python. I’ll also be demoing a new testing tool called “CaptureMock” which my husband Geoff has invented. I’ll be interested to hear what all the afficionadoes of other languages think of both it and python.

The programme for Scandinavian Developer Conference has been up for a while now, and I’m very pleased with the way its looking. The conference will be held in Göteborg in April, and I’m responsible for a whole track called “Conversation Corner”. I’m delighted so many people have agreed to take part, and I think we’ll be discussing some really interesting topics. I’m hoping it will be a really interactive part of the conference, as a complement to the other 10 tracks which mostly comprise presentations.

The programme for XP2011 also came out last week, although it is not yet complete. I’m Industry Chair for this conference, which will be held in Madrid in May, and I blogged before about my long association with this series of conferences. For this year, I’m still talking to people about putting together panel debates and discussions, and we also have space for more demos and lightning talks. The programme of tutorials and workshops is pretty much complete though, and I think we’ve got a great lineup of people leading them.

So I’ve got a very busy spring ahead of me with all these fantastic conferences coming up, and I’m thoroughly looking forward to all of them 🙂