DevWeek 2015 – a reflection

Verdict is a bit of a strong word, this is more akin to my thoughts on the entire experience. Overall, I think it’s been a really good experience; especially since it is my first developer conference. But is it £700 worth experience? That’s questionable, I certainly wouldn’t have paid for it myself.

There were some really inspiring talks : the headline speakers Kevlin on “a system is not a tree” and Alan on “#noestimates” really got the conference off to a great start. Some were really good and well delivered (Seb Rose), while many others were a bit shallow in content; most of those talks are information anyone would have gleaned if they were interested enough to turn up.

There was a talk on design smell which had the potential to be good but fell short in execution, while Neal Ford’s talk on microservices were a concoction of baffling and nonsensically purist; world of difference to a similar topic by Alan Holub. He gave me a distinct impression his expertise on that topic is purely academic, to go as far too ignore the utmost basic principle of OO, cohesion GOOD, coupling BAD…  Or he’s just on another level of brilliance I can’t comprehend.

Unfortunately I’ve not had the chance to do a workshop, maybe 2016?

 

Day One of DevWeek 2015: First thoughts

What a day! This is my first dev conference and there’s quite a few things that have really resonated with me today.

#noestimates

A great idea behind the movement, to go back to the fundamental argument – you cannot predict the future, and therefore don’t waste time trying to estimate. It’s an interesting take, especially the study on prediction but will it take off, or doomed to fail like all previous variations? Ultimately the real world operates on the concept of budget and time and no matter how hard we try, the we are not disconnected from reality.

Seb Rose is a great speaker

He knows his stuff, very engaging speaker and the notion of evolving test really resonated with me. More on this later.

microservices – you’re doing it wrong

Most of what Neal Ford said in the beginning of his talk made much sense. He talk about the inherent problems with afferent and efferent points, about coupling and cohesion and the nightmare dependency chains. But then he went on with a completely ludicrous statement “one service per method”. WTF? I thought he misspoke and probed the question but apparently he strongly believes that is what microservices is. Now, the good bit is that microservices isn’t an invention by some famous programmer but a collective conciousness of the software development world that were already moving towards that direction before someone (Fowler?) gave it a name.

I won’t go into why you should do microservices but this notion of “one service per method” and the idea that a service is a “single responsibility through one method” is absolutely .. nonsense to put it mildly. Do single responsibility classes have just one method? I think not! Somehow, it seems to me that the group of people who fall under this category simply wants to move the coupling problem from packages (or binaries) to services … because coupling is services is fine … NOT.

Just because you can’t see them, doesn’t mean it’s not there! The problem doesn’t just disappear because you adopted the ostrich “put my head in the sand” approach to problem solving. That is not to say that the service can’t be only one method, but in my world view, a microservice should have some form of “bounded context” which is simply more than “just one method”.

the message patterns talk .. yea .. was a bit basic.

The talk itself was quite fine if not for that I’ve already heard all of it before. I thought our very own JM’s talk on it were quite a bit more engaging but that’s just me.

This Week’s Special: DevWeek 2015 !

Hey folks! In a couple of hours, I will be attending DevWeek 2015! This is my first ever dev conference so I probably won’t be blogging “live” but I hope I will be updating my experience here, so watch this space!

Here’s my agenda for Tuesday:

• “less is more – an introduction to low fidelity approach” by Seb Rose.
• “building microservices architecture” by Neal Ford.
• “messaging patterns” by Mike Wood.
• “developing AWS applications with .Net” by Julien Lepine.
• “a system is not a tree” by Kevlin Heney.
• “#noestimates” by Allen Holub.

As you can probably tell from my pick list for tomorrow, my choice topics are mostly focused around design patterns and architecture, which is where my main interest lie.

…Can’t wait!