Communication, Craftsmanship

Controlling the source of truth -The value of better commit messages

Working as a developer involves communication on many levels. We need to communicate with business stakeholders in a domain specific language, abstracting away much of the technical jargon. Team communication on the other hand is a lot more technical, and closer to our reality in code.

A lot of our communication is silent though. It happens through async tools like email, Skype or Slack. I’m sure that anyone that’s attempted communicating this way has experienced how easy it is to under-communicate, leading to a ping-pong of messages before the intent and understanding is conveyed.

The end goal of all this communication is software that delivers value to users.

Software isn’t finished when it’s been delivered though. It changes over time and with it loses its original intent. This leads to even more async communication, which can go over months or years. I’m talking about the communication that happens through the code we write.

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Developer growth

The importance of time off

Burnout is a difficult topic that people experience in varying degrees throughout their professional and personal lives. Demands from our modern societies take their toll through ever-growing expectations from others, ourselves and what we believe others expect from us. There is a great deal of focus on how we can do more, but not on how to do less. Which is why I was positively surprised about a recent article from HBR which promoted the value of down-time.

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Community

The road to NDC Oslo 2016

Inspired by Torbjørn Marø’s writeup on his planned agenda for NDC 2016, I’ve written my own initial plans.

Topics

In my role as a team lead at KomplettDev I’ve started leaning naturally to topics on people / softskill / agile.

I’m not leaving technology behind , though. There are exciting things happening in the .NET cross-platform space, and it’s good to get up to speed with ASP.NET Core. We’ve just started with ReactJS, and it’ll be good to get some feedback from others’ experience using the technology in the wild.

There’s also the possibility that I’ll jump on a few architectural and deployment sessions.

The twist – I’ll be a speaker!

This year there’s a twist though. I’ll be attending a conference as a speaker for the first time! My colleague, Tomas Ekeli, and I will be speaking about how we’re scaling our team and architecture at Komplett in the session “Making Komplett big by going small“. We were a late entry to the conference and have naturally been placed in the last available slot.

I expect Friday to be filled with last-minute preparation, thoughts, nerves and whatever else is natural when speaking at a conference for the first time.

Connections

Probably the most important long-term effect of attending a conference like NDC Oslo is the social aspect. Because of the way the event is organized there’s a natural focus on being social in the breaks. I’m looking forward to meeting old friends, and making new ones.

Among the people attending the conference there’s one I’ll bring up: Dave Rael, the Developer on Fire. It’ll be great to finally meet Dave in person after being a guest on his podcast, and getting to know him through twitter / facebook-group.

Those plans…

As you’ll see there are just so many awesome sessions going on in parallel, so many last-minute decisions will be made on the floor!

As with any plans, they can be changed, and most probably will. I may sit out a session or two. Or maybe just socialize near the community area, representing NNUG (Norwegian .NET User Group).

So here’s my tentative agenda for the 3 days at NDC Oslo. Please reach out and say hi if you’re there. 

Wednesday

09:00

10:20

11:40

13:40

15:00

16:20

17:40

Thursday

09:00

10:20

11:40

13:40

15:00

16:20

17:40

Friday

09:00

10:20

11:40

13:40

15:00

16:20