Today I had an accident chance to join an interesting meetup about Craftsmanship in Copenhagen when I visited my company’s office. This event was hosted by NNIT that’s a one of the biggest companies in Denmark and spoken by Mark Seemann, a professional programmer, .NET fan and also a consultant.
It’s the first time I join a meetup in Copenhagen so cannot talk much about that but generally it’s quite good today: very professional and nice place, good speaker, great content, good participants, good free foods and drinks – one reason to attract about 200 people (?) 🙂
This talk was dived into 2 parts. In the first one, about 1 hours, Mark was talking about Software Craftsmanship in his viewpoint: making the good code in humance way by activating System 2 (you could find it, System 1 and System 2 in a great book Thinking, Fast and Slow of Daniel Kahneman). It also shows that a good developers need more soft skills such as psychology, communication… in the top of the toolset. After break, he came back to demo session of how to deal with legacy code by refactoring and adding tests. This example is mostly based on the last post on his blog with some update in the model technology like Entity Framework, DataContext, ApiController… instead of ADO.NET,… but the ideas are still there. Of course, his talk was leaded by some well-known books like Refactoring: Improve the Design of Existing Code of Martin Follower, Working Effectively with Legacy Code of Michael C. Feathers, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship of Uncle Bob… and Code Katas.
Ok, stop taking about him, do about me 🙂
What makes me happy is these content isn’t new for me compared to the content that we have delivered in annual events of Agile Vietnam. Of course, we always learn something from any meetup but if these things are predictable and doesn’t make our brain work hard, it wouldn’t be new. By comparing the topic quality of a developed country like Denmark, I’m proud of and believe on what Agile Vietnam is delivering to community. It stays up-to-date and world-class. At least, Michael C. Feathers has never talk in Denmark but he had in Vietnam 🙂
But I also feel a bit upset. Mark said “Yes, you are too young and don’t know” after he got laughs by talking a story “There are a lot of company have reference architecture design and they might apply C# style to iOS and Android app project”. It sounds funny, of course. But it’s true: “Yes, you are too young and don’t know”. If you ask a young developers about Agile, TDD, CI… they will tell you as it is only way to build the software today. But why don’t we stop talking about it? There are still the “old” men need to know and need to change. So one of our target is the experienced developers who was tight with the old way and might use C# style for iOS project just because it appears in the reference design. But I’m disappointed that it seems experienced developers don’t want to learn more in Vietnam – there are just few old guys in ours meetups.
But where will we go without learning?
