Evening Open Space - Lightening Talks, Remote Teams & Interview Techniques
This month seen a return to the evening open space format where a number of lightening talks kick off the night following by an ‘unconference’ style evening where people decide and vote on the night what they want to discuss.
The lightening talks commenced with Duncan Jones giving a show and tell of a CQRS Dsl/designer that he is working on. It’s a library that allows you to graphically design domain models consisting of aggregate identifiers, events, projects, commands, queries and identity groups with the resulting model then turned into code. Very interesting discussion on a very intersting topic/design pattern.
More details here: - CQRS Designer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%E2%80%93query_separation
Next up, Paul gave a talk about revisiting the SOLID principles with functional programming. The talk centered around whether the SOLID principles prevalent in object oriented progamming hold much ground in functional programming.
- Revisiting Solid Principles with FP (sorry about formatting)
The rest of the evening followed the ‘unconference’ format where we all voted on the following topics:
Working with remote teams & Interviewing techniques were the clear winners.
Interviewing/Interview techniques key points: - First year a new recruit is operating at a loss till they get up to speed, need to be there about 4-5 years to get your money back. - Very hard to see if someone is a behavioural fit in your team until they come and join. Obviously there are some red flags that you can spot in the interivew but others not as obvious. I was surprised to learn that 6 month probationary periods were used quite frequently for this purpose. - Need to see them code, however pairing tests can be quite intimidating. - Looking oversomes repo’s and seeing their style or what open source project they contributed too. This is a winner, it’s tells me that this person does this stuff in his own time. Show’s passion.
Remote teams key points - Donal recommended p4 and gerrit for tooling. Gerrit for code reviews and P4 as an awesome git merge tool. - Communication - email can be a killer as emotion never comes across well. Can create a divide, us/them between remote teams unless its managed ok. Video conferencing helps for this and regular calls and face to face time if possible.
Other photos from the evening: 
Thats all I can think of.
Thanks for coming and thanks again for Barry and all the team in TechMeetup.Space for hosting,
Paul & Joe