Saturday 14 September 2013

Uncle Bob: Demanding Software Professionalism

On Thursday I had the pleasure of seeing Uncle Bob for the first first time at his talk: Demanding Software Professionalism.

Previously I had only heard the legends about this man, never making the conscious effort to read/watch more about him. This meant hearing him talking about his beliefs and ideals firsthand was both novel and humbling.

The premise for the talk was all around how software engineers should be expected to be more professional. As is the norm with Software Craftsmanship, this isn't through pushing methodologies but sharing ideologies. We should all believe in a steady work rate, never shipping s*%t and being highly flexible to change (amongst other things!)

Combined with the LSCC Roundtable the night before, I really felt inspired to "be better". At the end of the event, I picked up a coding challenge. I completed the work, trying hard to keep in mind Simple Design and strictly following TDD.

https://github.com/arkangelofkaos/InstructionsProcessing

I've toyed with the idea of trying to make it more complicated with sophisticated error handling and introducing some functional programming to the mix. However the concept of "less code is better code" has hit home and I'm happy with it.

Feedback is definitely welcome and would be much appreciated!