From The Trenches 2018
I owe several long blog posts discussing the WeCode, meetup attendance, and several programming posts. I know, those are harder to write, though.
So instead I’ll write just a few words about the event I attended this week, the from the trenches 2018. I don’t know the edition number, we held at least 3 in Valladolid and this is the second one in Donostia (did we have one in 2014, I don’t remember…).
And this time the format changed radically, previous years we gave a talk about what we learned in the previous year… and this time we shared our experience in small groups and we tried to improve it to share it later with the rest of the world.
It was nice, albeit short, and it was hard focusing in an environment with so many distractions (food, friends…) and to extract global conclusions from so wildly different experiences. I had a blast, although I should have spoken with other people, apart from the great aloaisa, jacegu, patoroco or agustin!
It was also surprising to talk with 2 developers that worked with liferay (akajumi & wideawakening and discuss their pains developing with the platform. And the good parts, I’m usually harsher than the users about how I perceive the developer experience.
I know you are dying to know the things we discussed so I won’t ramble more. Here is the global summary of my group (go dolphins, I mean, group6), the recorded conclusions of all experiences and here are the individual experiences:
- Apa told us how to use small katas? based on your own real code/bugs (eating your own food experiences) as a way of learning a new language or a new domain.
- Nestor suggested a combination of hexagonal architecture + testing outside-in to create an application decoupled from frameworks.
- Beñat commented his experience developing a custom module (instead of using the framework) and the pain it caused in development and maintenance time.
- Acero explained how to use parallel changes to migrate the payment platform, the drawbacks and tips to do it successfully.
- Pablo discussed how to train a team to detect bad practices and to imbue them with the continuous improvement mindset.
- nhpatt rambled about APIs
Overall it was a great experience made it even better with the food and the conversations.
See you next year! :D
PD: We missed @juanignaciosl so much, that couldn’t come at the last minute :’(
