7 December 2015

Another Journeyman Week

Recently I had the chance to accompany one of my fellow Craftsman to his work and immediately agreed to do so. While my own Code Cop Pair Programming Tour finished in 2013 I am still enthusiastic about being on tour. In the spirit of documenting my previous 13 weeks, I consider these past days to be week number 14 of my (probably never ending) Code Cop Tour ;-)

Room for Coderetreat Gran CanariaGlobal Day of Coderetreat 2015
To improve my facilitation skills, I ask facilitators to run trainings together with me. My friend Carlos Blé agreed to host me for a Code Retreat and I ended in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria for the Global Day of Coderetreat 2015. I recommend Gran Canaria for GDCR because the weather was much nicer than in Austria during mid-November.

For the Code Retreat itself I proposed to have a specific focus, a theme that we would use to shape the day. Carlos selected Object Orientated Design and we built the whole day around it. We started the day with a (very) short introduction - probably more a summary - of basic object oriented design principles. During the day we only used design centric constraints like No Naked Primitives or Tell Don't Ask. I was concerned that some people would like to try functional programming and indeed there was one participant working in Clojure in all sessions. But he did not complain and tried to fulfil the constraints, which was certainly a great exercise, even when using functional paradigms. We also asked participants to use Test Driven Development and pair programming, but we did not stress these topics. By making the Code Retreat more focused, we were able to exercise a single topic more in depth.

Besides from copying Carlos' every move, I learned a lot from the changed setting. I was a guest and knew nothing about how the Craftsmanship group of Gran Canaria and their Code Retreats. Further I had trouble communicating clearly and talked too fast for the Spanish participants. In return I did not get much feedback because I had not communicated well - which left me confused and made me sweat. I cannot remember feeling that exposed. The whole setting proved to be very challenging, exactly what I had been looking for.

Ruben wrote a summary of the day, which saved me from writing it myself. The slides Carlos and I used are available here.

AIDA Secret DoorAIDA Canaries
Because I "happened" to be around, Carlos invited me to spend a few days with his current client, AIDA, probably the largest IT company native to the island of Gran Canaria. I spend three days mob programming with Carlos, Emilio Medina and Ronny Ancorini. I used the opportunity to improve my C#, which I had not used since my session with Paul two years ago. I learned some more things about C# and ReSharper. We worked long hours and I did not see much of Gran Canaria during these days. As I had not come as a tourist, I did not mind.

Carlos published his summary of my visit already, which saved me a lot of typing again. (It seems that it pays off that my post is a month late ;-) I really loved staying some days in AIDA, everybody was nice and very inclusive. While a few employees had problems talking English, everybody seemed to appreciate my visit and the discussions I started. I enjoyed my time there. Thank you!

Spontaneous Unconference on Functional Programming
The following Friday I was lucky to meet Nicole Rauch. She had come to Vienna for her talk at the Agile Tour Vienna. She was one day early and we took the opportunity to spend the day together. While I had planned to host her, my friend Görge Albrecht, the "Code Mentor", stepped up and did the extra work of really organising the day, getting the necessary infrastructure and even paid for drinks and lunch. (Thank you Görge, I owe you.) The Software Craftsmen GmbH helped us out with their meeting room and shared their office with us for a day. The Software Craftsmen are a young company of experienced but still enthusiastic software professionals.

Mini Open Space MarketplaceSo a few members of the Vienna Craftsmanship group came together to discuss, share and exchange knowledge with Nicole. In the morning we collected possible topics. As Nicole is into functional programming, it was no surprise that Haskell, Monads and all kind of functional topics came up. We started discussing and reviewing one of her older presentation on Monads, which gave us plenty food for thought. In the afternoon we decided to do some coding and mob programmed an asynchronous error handling Monad in NodeJS. It was a great day and I learned a lot. Thank you Nicole for finding time for us and squeezing in a day of learning between your customer meetings, travel time and conference presentations.

Conclusion
The bottom line of this week is that our community is very inclusive. It is easy to find people who will accept you as a guest or be your guest if you just pay a little attention to their schedule. I had found Nicole's name in the list of speakers of Agile Tour Vienna, so I knew she would come. All I had to do was reach out to her early enough and we made it happen. The same was true for my visit to Carlos. I knew he would run a Code Retreat for GDCR15, so all I had to do was propose doing it together. I encourage you to look out for such kind of learning opportunities. Follow the people you meet at conferences, pay some attention to their (promotional) tweets and conference schedules and do not be afraid to reach out and ask them to spend some time together to discuss, learn, practise or just write some code together.

4 comments:

Carlos Ble said...

It was a pleasure to host you my friend, thank you for coming! :-D

Unknown said...

Thank you Peter for coming and teaching us a lot. It makes me very happy you enjoyed these weeks ;)

Thank you also for organizing the GDCR. Your visit was very special for me!

I hope to see you soon

Unknown said...

Interesting article, thank you! Simply talking with people gets you around quite good - This also applies within large companies when you want to change something.

As for your observation "...our community is very inclusive.": I see the intention of this sentence, also expressed with your article. For me it doesn't hold up to its meaning. For example: There's now even a company called "Software Craftsmen", which, sure enough, has only men as their team (as per homepage).
This is a fundamental flaw in the "trademark" name of "Software Craftsman" (rather than an alleged business directive by the mentioned company - I'm sure they'll also hire women should they want).
So, yes, I also experience the craftsmanship community as being more open minded. A limiting name and stereotypes make it difficult to be truly inclusive to all craftsworker.

Peter Kofler said...

Christian,
thank you for your comment.

As you know I am aware of the diversity and harassment problems our industry has. I now see that the word "inclusive" is not the right word here, because it is usually related to these problems. What I meant was that it is easy to get in touch with people you met before. Maybe another word would have been better.

Regarding the use of male specific terms, e.g. "Craftsmen": I found that if I want to praise, I do need to hold back criticism from time to time. Because I am a strict person, there is always something that I do not agree with. I would never be able to say something good. I choose to focus on the one thing I want to point out at a time. I am still happy that the Software Craftsmen company hosted us and it was great of them to do so. I do not wish to discuss other implications of their name or employee structure right now. But likely this is a topic for my series of interviews, which has not touched diversity yet. Maybe you are interested to share your views? Drop me an email and we will talk.