About
A few of us from some local dev usergroups have been discussing starting a usergroup focussed on principles in software development. This is not as dry as it sounds – honest! We are essentially trying to avoid the ‘C’ word (Craftsmanship!) as we’re (a) not sure everyone is aware of the term and (b) some of those that are have misconceptions about it – frequently it is seen as elitist. This could not be further from what we are trying to achieve.
Software is complex stuff. This is something that has been appreciated and contemplated since the 70s. This thought and the subsequent principles, practices and patterns come in and out of favour in the main stream but the core philosophies remain: to ensure maintainable and verifiable code that is as easy as possible to change in the future. We want to start a usergroup for the West Midlands area that provides a forum to explore these principles.
As an example of some of the things we could look at:
- Dependency Injection (DI)
- TDD
- SOLID principles
- Leadership & Mentoring
- Continuous Integration/Delivery/Deployment
- BDD
- DDD
- SOA
- OO Patterns
- Functional Programming
Due to the nature of our background the group will be .Net focussed but tool/framework agnostic. The tools and frameworks are convenient when implementing solutions with these principles in mind but we feel it is the principles themselves we must appreciate to be truly effective developers.
The form and content of the usergroup’s meetings is up for grabs. We want the usergroup to have ownership of its direction. We will outline a program for the first two or three meetings to get us up and running but will actively encourage suggestions and contributions from members. However, just sitting back and absorbing the discussions is equally acceptable. Possible meeting formats include: stand up presentations from one or a number of speakers, round table discussions, coding exercises, Q & A’s, problem help forums.
We are aiming for a first meeting in January and it is likely to be a presentation on our aims and a discussion of future direction. Ian Russell has also agreed to do a quick presentation on Dependency Injection to get the ball rolling. Pizza or foodstuffs of some kind will be provided too!
If you are interested in joining us please contact us and we’ll add you to our top-secret mailing list and keep you abreast of developments.