Nach vielen Jahren Pause hat Kent Beck (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck) Ende November 2023 wieder ein Buch publiziert: Tidy First?

Um was geht es in diesem Buch?

Kent Beck geht den grundlegenden Fragen nach, ob, wann (vorher oder nachher) und wie viel es sich lohnt, aufzuräumen und damit in das Softwaredesign zu investieren, wenn es darum geht, einen "Behaviour Change" in einer Software durchzuführen.

“I have to change this code, but it’s messy. What should I do first?”

“Maybe I should tidy the code before I make the change. Maybe. Some. Or maybe not?”

Dazu stellt er im ersten Teil des Buches mit den "Tidyings" zunächst eine Sammlung von 15 kurzen, praktischen Möglichkeiten vor, wie die Lesbarkeit und Struktur von Code verbessert werden kann (z.B. "delete redundant comments", "chunck statements", "extract helper", ...) und wie damit Code aufgeräumt werden kann.

"A tidying is like a little baby miniature refactoring. Each short chapter is a tidying. If you see code like this, then change it to code like that. Then send it to production."

Im zweiten Teil des Buches ("Managing") geht es darum, wann und wie diese Tidyings angewendet werden können, z.B. durch die Trennung der Commits in strukturelle Änderungen versus Verhaltensänderungen (Kapitel "Separate Tidying" und "Rhythm"). Dabei geht der Autor auch auf ganz grundsätzliche Fragen ein, z.B. ob überhaupt aufgeräumt werden soll und wenn ja, wie viel, vor oder nach der Verhaltensänderung?

"Just being able to identify that a tidying applies and applying it doesn’t mean you’ve mastered tidying. The title of this book is Tidy First?, with emphasis on the question mark. I wanted to acknowledge that just because you can tidy doesn’t mean you should tidy."

Der dritte Teil des Buches ("Theory") geht noch etwas mehr in die Tiefe als der zweite Teil. Hier geht es u.a. um die Definition des Begriffs Software Design ("Beneficially Relating Elements"), um die Abwägung, sich Möglichkeiten offen zu halten versus die Kosten dafür ("Economics: Time Value and Optionality"), wo besonders hingeschaut werden muss und wo nicht ("Reversible Structure Changes") und die Kosten der Kopplung bzw. Entkopplung ("Coupling Versus Decoupling").

"Here’s where I finally get to spread my wings and dig deep into the topics that excite me. What do I mean by “software design is an exercise in human relationships”? Who are these humans? How are their needs better met with better software design? Why does software cost so damn much? What can we do about it (spoiler alert: software design)? Coupling? Cohesion? Power laws?"

Persönliche Bewertung und Empfehlung

Das Buch gefällt mir aus mehreren Gründen sehr gut

• Klare Gliederung

• kompakter Umfang (99 Seiten)

• und vor allem, weil wesentliche Fragen der Wirtschaftlichkeit von Softwaredesign und Strukturverbesserungen angesprochen werden.

Ich empfehle dieses Buch jedem professionellen Softwareentwickler.

There were 18 tracks over three days. Each track focused on one topic so there were many many topics covered overall 😅.

Besides the typical "evergreen topics" like Architecture, Cloud, Data Engineering, Frontend and Backend Engineering, there were topics like AI, Sustainability and new ways of working.

Check out https://qconlondon.com/schedule for all the tracks and topics.

What were the highlights?

I value very much that the talks were typically from practitioners sharing their recent real-world experiences, for example in topics like platform engineering. So this is my first and general highlight.

Other highlights for me were these talks:

• https://qconlondon.com/presentation/mar2023/eventual-consistency-dont-be-afraid

• https://qconlondon.com/presentation/mar2023/beyond-micro-frontends-effective-composable-decoupled-applications-cloud

• https://qconlondon.com/presentation/mar2023/interaction-between-hybrid-and-remote-working-revolution-and-maintaining-our

and Keith Winstein's Talk

• https://qconlondon.com/presentation/mar2023/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-networks

Check out the abstracts by following the links for some of the details.

About QCon conferences in general

Who are the organizers?

The company behind the QCon conferences is C4Media (C4 = Community of Communities created by the Community & for the Community), which was founded in 2006. The two main activity areas of C4Media are the https://www.infoq.com/ website, which I read probably since 2009 or so, and the various QCon conferences all over the world.

How is the content selected?

"Emerging software trends and innovations" to "stay ahead of the adoption curve" are some of the key ideas behind the conference.

In case you are already familiar with the "crossing the chasm" model by Geoffrey A. More, the conference organizers pick up current topics and practices of innovators and early adopters.

Be aware that this focus is of course interesting but might also be depressing for you if your company is usually in the "late majority" of adoption of things.

Be also aware that important, age-old and still relevant topics like Lean are not covered at all because they are probably not "new and shiny" anymore.

There is no public "call for proposals". As far as I understood, the speakers are somehow individually selected and invited from the large network of C4Media.

Price and location

The price for the 3-day conference was about 2'400 GBP (incl. VAT) and is in my opinion "in the upper range" of the spectrum for software engineering conferences.

The https://qeiicentre.london/ is right next to Westminster Abbey and Big Ben in the heart of London.

Nice view from inside the building:

Who are the attendees?

According to https://qconferences.com/#join-software-devs "it’s the place where senior software engineers, tech leads, and architects come together to learn, share, and push each other to drive innovation in the software industry."

From my personal experience, I'd second that because of meeting lots of people with a lot of experience in the field, i.e. 10 - 30 years or so. A lot of people are from the UK, but also from other countries. I met people from Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Sweden, Cyprus, Switzerland, ...

Because of London as location, there are a lot of people from the finance and insurance industry.

To whom would I recommend the conference?

If you are more or less

• fluent in the English language

• would like to get an overview of what's going on in the industry with an international perspective

• are interested in the more fundamental aspects of software engineering like architecture, product thinking and how to organize work and people

• interested in emerging trends and innovation in software engineering

• and are able and interested to travel to London

I'd recommend having a closer look at the https://qconferences.com/ conferences.

If you are more interested in "just coding", the latest programming language features, the newest frontend frameworks, just a single technology like Kafka, agile without any actual software engineering, then better check out other conferences.