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The ultimate craftsman at work
By Jakob Færch | October 1, 2008
I admit it. I’m a sucker for Kevlin Henney. I’ll basically attend any talk with him in the speaker’s slot.
No matter what the subject is, his presentation skills, the craftmanship of being on stage, never ceases to amaze me.
This year, it happened so that his “Programmer’s Dozen” has been mentioned to me a few times and really interested me – and not only because it’s apparently a dozen with thirteen items.
In the list of advice offered by Kevlin, not many will find things they haven’t been heard a hundred before times before. Many of the items might even seem obvious, like advice any modern developer agrees on and lives by.
But in a talk like this, it becomes obvious that they’re not. What Henney adds to the soup of well known phrases is his own exquisite blend of:
- Code samples violating the advice in either obvious or not so obvious ways. Code samples I think everybody recognize – as code they’ve been writing themselves, although we all agree on the guideline just presented
- An enormous dose of wit and oral agility when making fun of himself, the audience and the entire world of IT professionals
- The courage to actually take a stand and give concrete advice on what to do facing the fact that you somehow seem to be driven towards making your own code bad.
If you missed the talk, the video people was there, so the talk will show up here on the JAOO Community blog in the coming months.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Neat, I SHOULD have attended this talk (as it was one of the three sessions that seemed interesting in this slot of time), but was afraid I’d already seen it and therefor selected another.
October 1st, 2008 at 9:54 pm
This was the best talk of the day for me, along with Martin Fowler. Good stuff.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:19 pm
I agree that Kevlin Henney’s talk was good, but I was totally blown away by Erik Dörnenburg’s talk about Test Driven Development.
It was SOO good, and my notes contains quite a lot of COOL, WOW, GREAT, WE WANT THAT AT WORK!comments here and there, as he laid out how to make the perfect easy-read encapsulated unit tests using Mockito and Hamstring.
It was a practical, deep, full of new info, easy to understand and “realtime coding” presentation.