Christian Heilmann's was the 5th talk on @mediAjax's first day and it was an excellent description of managing teams of developers, which we probably ought to be expounding to our students and some of which I'll be trying out ("code review" as assessment practice and "lightning talks" for Faculty dissemination seem like good ideas...) His list of bad assumptions is worth repeating here -- don't assume that:
- I don't need to tell anyone this, they must already know.
- Surely everyone knows this.
- This works now, we'll never need to change it.
- This hasn't worked in the past therefore it'll never work.
- This is a minor issue; no need to file a bug.
- Hack it now, we'll have time to fix it properly later.
Some other good (mis-remembered) quotes: A good developer is not necessarily good because he's talented or gifted. He's the guy who works well with others … and works for the next guy
(the guy who takes over his code!) JS and Ajax are part of the development cycle, not add-ons.
Web products are never finished.
Reasons/procedures for conducting code review:
- Identify problems and solutions.
- Training needs become obvious.
- Share knowledge.
- Identify reusable resources (then give team-members time to make them publishable.)
- Don't innovate during production (except at team level.)
- Ignore the "inner hacker", the "feature creeper".
- Promote team players.
- Optimise for production but keep code maintainable and understandable ("compile").
- Use libraries.
- se comments sensibly and meaningful variable/method names.
I liked his description of modern web developers as more "librarian" than "memory guy" -- like I tell my WebTech students: I don't expect you to remember all of this [CSS, JS, DOM stuff] but I do expect you to know where to look it up.
Overall he was the 2nd person to kind-of say that the "waterfall" development process was dead and that Agile/scrum was the way to go...
1 comment:
I am a very happy bunny to see that I inspired someone in academia with my approach to develop with larger teams. Seeing the prolific way you are covering the event, I wondered if you have heard of our university hack day programmes? We (well, normally me) go to universities in the UK and entice students to create mash-ups with our technologies. We judge them and give out prizes for the best and offer the opportunities to apply for internships for the winners.
Some Universities (Dundee especially) also made this part of the course deliveries, which is such a great idea to offer students some real-market experience as part of their studies.
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