The Living Room Architect

I'm involved in helping set-up and run a new conference in London about "building it right". It's called the Software Craftsmanship 2009 Conference. The website is now live thanks to Jason Gorman who's chairing the conference and it's all systems go. Registration is free and opens on the 1st of December, proposals for presentations and tutorials are due by the 7th of Jan.

http://www.softwarecraftsmanship.org.uk/

As the site says:
"This conference is all about the principles and practices, and the disciplines and habits, that distinguish the best 1% of software professionals from the 99% who are failing their customers and failing their profession by taking no care or pride in their work and delivering buggy, unreliable and unmaintainable code."

This is an area that I feel hasn't had enough focus in recent years, and Software Craftsmanship is something I'm really keen on learning more about. As software craftsmen and craftswomen we are professionals and that needs to be reflected in the software we create. I want to be sure that the software I write is of the best possible quality and this conference is a great way to learn from the experts how to do just that. It's a conference where some of the best software professionals in the world will be gathering to compare notes and share what they've learnt, so get involved.

Of course, if you are already part of that illusive 1% then why don't you submit a proposal for a tutorial or presentation and show us all how it's done... Lasse?

Jason Gorman is chairing a conference about Software Craftsmanship to be held at the BBC Media Centre in London on Feb 26th 2009.

This is a conference about the "hard skills" that programmers and teams require to deliver high quality working software. Details and the request for proposals are now available on his blog.

I'm excited about this conference because I care about software craftsmanship and I'm excited because I'll be helping review the proposals. It's the first conference I've been involved with in this capacity and I'm really looking forward to reading through all of the proposals as they come in.

So if you've got some ideas make sure you get your proposal to Jason by the 7th of Jan. For further updates follow his blog.

I find Cay Horstmann's comments on unit testing in the article disturbing.

"I perform an occasional unit test after I've encountered a failure that I don't want to have recur, but I rarely write the tests first. If so many experienced developers don't write unit tests, what does that say? Maybe they would be even better developers if they followed Heinz's advice. Maybe they don't make many mistakes that unit tests would catch because they're already experienced. The truth is probably somewhere in between." Cay Horstmann Professor of Computer Science, San Jose State University.

It says to me that they are either lazy, stupid or not experienced developers. To me there is no in between. If these developers wrote unit tests they absolutely would be better programmers. It's a shame they will never be because they are too arrogant to admit they make mistakes.

At least Heinz Kabutz has got it right when he says that not writing unit tests is the biggest mistake even experienced developers make. I agree with Heinz 100%

So what about you? Do you write unit tests? Do you always write them first?