Venkat Subramaniam to the rescue

I have met Venkat Subramaniam for the first time on 33rd Degree conference. After his first presentation (by the way - it had fancy title "Pointy haired bosses and pragmatic programmers: Facts and Fallacies of Software Development") I was like "This guy has enormous knowledge and knows how to share it ! I must see his other presentations !". So I went to his two other presentations and guess what ? They were awesome as well !

Venkat is a unique kind of person that talks in very interesting way and touches topics that are very close to every software developer (if you want to get know more about him I'm sure you can find a plenty information on google). Lately he has tweeted that he updated his blog with links to recent presentations (link). I have watched most of them and I want to recommend my three favourites.

How to approach Refactoring (link)

In this presentation Venkat focused on fundamental issues connected to refactoring process. The talk is not about some particular technique. It is more about when and how to approach refactoring. As always many helpful tips with a little specific Venkat sense of humour.

• Make it work, then make it better.
• Make it simple, not clever.
• Long functions used to be faster but that was when Nixon was a president.
• When people design for extensibility the software is extensible as long as you don't extend it.

Caring about Code Quality (link)

Do you care about quality of your code ? You should ! In this presentation Venkat explains why it is important to care about our code. How we can ensure code quality as individuals and as team ? How to talk with people who write long functions ? You can find answers to this questions (and to a lot more) in this presentation.

• You can't be agile if your code sucks !
• Agile by convenience.
• Companies never have time and money to do it but always find time and money to redo it.
• Great programmers are shameless.
• Never get merge hell, you should give it.

Practices of an Agile Developer (link)

Talk about how to be agile and successful. Most of presentation is focused on communication which is one of the key points of agile development.

• Blame don't fix problem
• If you don't like some language or technology learn everything about it so you can bash it intelligently.
• Every programmer who refuses to design refuses to think.
• People who are architects and refuse to code draw pretty pictures.