Coderetreat Facilitation Podcast

tl;dr: I am podcasting about Coderetreat facilitation.

I regularly facilitate Coderetreats - as part of my work as Code Cop and for the local Software Crafters community. To support people organising events in other cities, I run Coderetreat facilitation trainings each year, especially in the months before the Global Day (of Coderetreat). Based on the feedback I get, e.g. Thanks for the training today! Very helpful! I see that these trainings are helpful for people who want to run Coderetreats. Often people ask the same questions, so I decided to record the most common questions. I will publish the recordings as I create them, so it is a podcast. (A podcast is an episodic series of digital audio files that a user can download in order to listen.)

Get it here: coderetreat-facilitation.code-cop.org

About
In the podcast I am answering questions about Coderetreat hosting, facilitation and participation. It will help you run Coderetreats, Coding Dojos, hands on meetups and even classic training. Each episode covers two to three questions and takes up to 10 minutes. From time to time I will invite guest facilitators to discuss with me. In the first few episodes I will also cover basic questions about the Coderetreat itself, e.g. What is a Coderetreat?

Frequency
As each episode is short, I plan to release at least two each month. While I am too late for #GDCR19, there should be around 30 questions and answers ready for people who want to help organising the next #GDCR20. That would be like three hours facilitation training. That would be great. Let's see how far I get.

Questions
If you have any questions regarding your Coderetreat, Coding Dojo or hands-on workshop, please send me an email or leave a comment. I will answer the question in one of the next episodes.

Get it here: coderetreat-facilitation.code-cop.org

Who should go on journeyman tour

In our recent, bi-weekly software engineering podcast we talked about my Journeyman Tour. In particular Christian wanted to know who should go on such a tour. We discussed for a while, in fact I was talking most of the time and interrupting everybody ;-) It was kind of a hard question and I had not thought about it before, some new ideas came up.

Listen to Developer Melange: Who should do a journeyman tour?

Developer Melange Episode 3

Yesterday the third episode of the Developer Melange podcast was published. Developer Melange is a monthly podcast which brings you regular discussions about software engineering topics. All of them, in one way or another, related to building great software products. It is recorded by my friends and fellow software crafters Paul Rohorzka, David Leitner and Christian Haas and they release around an hour of high quality discussion every month.

I am supporting them since the very beginning. In fact I was playing with the idea of recording a monthly podcast already for some time. After my summer project I finally found the time to visit them during recording: We discussed the essence of Behaviour Driven Development, starting with Dan North's introductory article from 2006. It seems that we could not agree what the essence or core of BDD might be. In the second part we tried to answer the question if it is better to be a specialist or generalist in the field of software delivery. Of course the time was too short for such deep topics. ;-)

Get it here
Listen to this episode here. All previous (and future) episodes can be found on the Developer Melange home page and Developer Melange SoundCloud page. If you need an RSS feed for an old-fashioned podcast app, use Get RSS feeds from SoundCloud URLs, which is this RSS.

Feedback
The team and I are curious what you think about Developer Melange. You can reach us on Twitter or leave comments on SoundCloud. Tell us what you think! Any suggestions, e.g. topics you would like to hear about, and also criticism are highly welcomed. Stay tuned!

Code Quality Assurance

Last week I had the opportunity to give an one hour presentation on code quality assurance as part of the lecture on software testing to students of the Fachhochschule Technikum Wien. By "code quality assurance" I meant principles and techniques used by software developers to test their software and keep it free of bugs.

I believe that the most important ingredient of code quality is the mind-set of the developer. So I started with some slides about the Zero-Defect Mindset and Software Craftsmanship. Then I did a live demo performing the Prime Factors Code Kata to show the basics of unit testing, Test-Driven Development and regression testing. This was the main part of the presentation.

After that I explained the principles of code coverage, continuous integration, static code analysis and code reviews to the students. I mixed the theory (slides) with hands-on examples on the newly created Java code using EclEmma, Hudson, PMD and ReviewClipse.

Doing the demo was fun and the whole presentation was a success. For the demo I tried to stick to Scott Hanselman's Tips for a Successful Technical Presentation, esp. font size (Lucida Console, 16pt). Here is my "BigFonty" checklist:

• Create a new, clean user profile for presentation only.
• Set icons to large and number of colours to maximum.
• Remove all icons from the desktop and choose a plain desktop background. I like to minimise all windows if I get lost between them.
• Disable any screen saver and turn off energy saving. Otherwise they will definitely activate at the most annoying moment.
• Set the command shell font to Lucida Console 16 point, bold, green on black. Have the default shell point to your main demo directory.
• Clean up the browser, remove unnecessary tool bars and symbols. Unfortunately, at least in Windows, new users always have tons of crap on the desktop and in the browser.
• Set the default browser page to empty or your main demo web-site.
• Set the font size in your browser to very large and enable override of font sizes in styles. This is done in some accessibility sub-menu.
• Use the browser in full screen mode (F11). You need all the space available for the large text.
• Set the main font in your IDE to Lucida Console 16. In Eclipse it's enough to change the Text Font (in the Basic category in the sub-menu Colours and Fonts in Appearance).
• Turn on line numbering in the IDE for quick reference of single lines.
• Maximise the IDE and use a full screen source window whenever possible. In Eclipse just press Ctrl-M to maximise a view.
• Start all applications like IDE or any server before the presentation. They may take some time.

(Download slides or source of Prime Factors Code Kata.)

Update 20 April 2010

Student Feedback

Today I got the feedback evaluation from FH Technikum Wien. Several students mentioned my presentation as exciting and full of practical experience. :-) One called my presentation idiosyncratic - I don't mind, it definitely was. It's only weak point was that students were not able to study using the slides alone. Next time I will prepare some handouts with more information.

Update 8 May 2010

German Podcast of Presentation

I finally managed to post-process the (German) audio stream of the talk and combine it with the slides. Watch the quality assurance podcast (in German). It's still missing the demos, but my explanations should give you a general idea what's going on.