Socrates Canaries 2015, experience and notes

Few weeks ago I attended to the first Socrates conference organized in spain (In Tenerife) Socrates Canaries. This posts summary some of the thinks I have learned, ideas to explore, techniques to use or tests, and notes about this open space.


Notes about Impact mapping:

• Very good fit with DDD or any business focus design process
• The "what" level can be use as a initial bounded context division
• All the vocabulary/terms used during the impact mapping is part of the ubiquitous language of each domain context
• Very powerful tool to improve the communication between business people and development

Interesting talk:
Crafted design / Iteration Driven Design by Sandro Mancuso, a pragmatic and evolutioned view of DDD,  very alined with outside-in TDD, XP and any kind of decoupled architecture focused on business domain (hexagonal, clean architecture, etc...). In our software we can extract explicit classes for actions / use cases.

Others deliveries of the same talk:

• At GeeCON 2014 https://vimeo.com/101106002
• At Lean Agile Scotland https://vimeo.com/107963074

Contract real experts when we have a prototype or a small system in production that use a new/unknown/unvalidated technology so the experts can validate or change all our assumptions (never contract this kind of experts at initial phases because we don't know what to ask).

Recruitment, "don't suspect when you select, don't select when you suspect".

Dreyfus model Interesting model on how acquire skills. As I understand the model, I consider myself an apprentice at all the topics/technologies I use, so I should be alert about the Dunning-Kruger effect :-)

OO TDD Outside-in design tips:

• Classes should only be created to either serve an existing class or an external need (app entry point, etc.)
• Classes always should be designed from the client's prespective. Never in isolation (tends to overengineering, accidental complexity and premature abstractions).

I have some ideas/notes about when to use classic or mockists tdd, but this will be another blog post.

Interesting technologies:

• Consumer-Driven Contracts (Contracts testing) Pact Pacto
• logspout to agreggate/dispatch containers logs
• codehale metric
• http://mesos.apache.org/
• https://mesosphere.github.io/marathon/
• https://github.com/mesos/chronos

Interesting books:

• Pragmatic thinking and learning

Homework:

• Improve my english
• Force pair programming
• Do not be shy :-)

Personal feelings and notes:

• With some difficulty, I can propose/present a session at open spaces / conferences like this... (challenge archived).
• I returned home full of energy.
• I love the open space format.
• The practices we are using and the software we are developing at Alea Soluciones, archieves a very good results and have high quality.
• As a team, I think that we can contribute our bit to the craftmanship comunity.
• New contacts, new friends, old friends, passión, fun time.

Without doubt, one of the best events I've attended. Kudos to the people who orginazed it, especially to Carlos Ble