Dev8D

Feb 17, 2009 by devcsi-team

I have just returned from The Developer Happiness Days hosted in London which offered a unique approach to innovation and development. In most sectors, developers get raw deal. They are the voiceless and the downtrodden. They are found lurking in the windowless basements of corporate offices working into the early hours, pasty faced, tired and lonely with only LCD glare for company.

Melodrama aside, David Flanders has hosted a week long event that addressed the unbalance. The event aimed to and succeeded in, giving developers a voice and drawing them more in to the collaborative process of software and systems development.

Developers of varying vintage assembled in Bloomsbury keen to participate and network. The fresh faced developers were able to absorb the many lightning talks and presentations, with the experienced hosting these lightning sessions and sharing their knowledge. I think it is fair to say that there was something for everyone, with all the developers leaving that little bit wiser.

I found two of the sessions particularly useful. The first highlighted the pain that can be encountered when dealing with character encodings and why you should always program for unicode and demonstrated some best practices. We were shown why ignoring unicode will give you headaches further in the development cycle and shown that early and late encoding conversion using supplied pything api calls could alleviate much of the pain. The second by Mark van Harmelen – Designing with Sketches, Paper Prototypes, and Users showed a much faster, better (and fun) way to develop software designs and prototypes. By tearing up paper and moving Post-its about a far friendlier way of designing was demonstrated. As someone who previously moved in the complicated and sometimes restrictive world of UML this was incredibly valuable.

The participants were given poker chips to be used as currency. They could either be exchanged for beer on Wednesday or cashed in to enter a competition where the people with the most chips won a rather snazzy netbook. After the first day everyone soon became accustomed to handing over chips and interacting at a level I don’t think would have been reached otherwise.

We followed up with a Dragon’s Den inspired idea where the developers pitched software solutions to a panel. This was a light-hearted critique session that proved valuable for both the advice and formalising the pitch process. Having participated in the session I can report that it was both useful and good fun. Maybe next year we could get some fancy dress in the style of a Harry and Paul sketch… ok maybe not.

Is this a first, investing and listening to developers in such a public and large scale? I think this might just catch on and I certainly hope it does. A big thanks to David Flanders, Ben O’Steen and Rachel Bruce for a fantastic week.