Software Craftsmanship Barcelona 2017

Four weekends ago, a few colleagues from Codesai and I attended the Software Craftsmanship Barcelona 2017 conference. While some of them had already come in previous years, I was a first timer and my expectations were very high. I have heard very positive comments from attendees to previous editions. For the year I lived in Barcelona, I became a member of the community and tried to attend to all the katas every Monday, where information about the event leaked little by little. I was lucky to get them on the first day on sale.

I would like to thank the organisers and the community, all this anticipation and nerves for getting the tickets were well worth it.

Talks

It was hard to choose which talks to attend to but thanks to autentia, we can watch all the talks over and over again. From every talk I attended to I took home at least one important learning pill.

Native and browser SPA versions using re-frame, ClojureScript and ReactNative Manuel Rivero On this talk, my colleague and mentor Manuel shared his learnings from one of his projects using ClojureScript and re-frame. I found the concept of effects and coeffects very interesting and I am tempted to get over the parentheses (or “elegant weapons for a more civilized age” as he prefers to call them) and start learning Clojure.

Simplicidad (para desarrolladores) Edu Ferro Edu made a very convincing case for the need of developers to put their feet on the ground and design solutions with simplicity in mind. I really liked the concept that he introduced for introducing new features in our systems: refactor the code before integrating that feature for it to fit as if it was designed with the rest of the system from the get go.

Slow Life (Como montárselo bien como programador) Luis Rovirosa, Jordi Anguela Luis and Jordi tried to make us reflect whether we feel we are doing well or not as developers in both our professional and personal lives. I found the talk very insightful, with tips and tricks to prioritize our objectives and to reach the point where we want to be. I felt reflected on most of the points they brought across since I have lived similar moments along my personal and professional career.

TDD: Mi libro de recetas Modesto Sanjuan Modesto made a very practical talk about why he uses TDD and some tools to avoid some of it pitfalls. Very interesting discussions were raised about naming, test structuring and assertions that made me reassess my knowledge about TDD.

The Economics of Continuous Delivery Adrian Perreau Adrian presented a very interesting and mathematical approach on how to sell Continuous Delivery to stakeholders in the language they most commonly understand, MONEY! With the aid of some mathematical formulas he showed us how to calculate the effort and money needed in traditional Integration and Delivery compared with Continuous Delivery. (Hint: Continuous Delivery is the clear winner)

Clean Code, SOLID, CQRS… ¿Y qué hay de nuestros test? Rafa Gómez y Javi Ferrer On their very fun and interesting talk, Rafa and Javi talked about how to test our CQRS architectures. They made a good introduction of the different types of tests they normally use when developing CQRS applications, when they prefer to use them. They also introduced some really interesting test anti-patterns with seriously cool names.

Event Organisation and Food

I would like to take the time to thank again the organisers, they made such a great event possible. We know that growing from 80 to 200 people is not easy but they succeeded. There was always one organiser available when I needed assistance and I always knew what was going on.

I really liked the venue, even if it is not in the most centric part of Barcelona, we had well sized rooms that and some green areas where we could get out and relax. The food during the day was also a high point, with fruit and drinks readily available.

The community

I would also like to thank the Software Craftsmanship community, I am proud to belong to such a group of people where we find a safe space to talk about how to continue improving on both our professional and personal facets of our lives. I have joined many interesting hall talks and finally devirtualized people like Rachel or Modesto. I leave the event with more desire to continue learning than ever. Will be back!