Evening Open Space - Lightening Talks, How do you keep up to date

Evening Open Space 21st July 2016

This month seen a return to the evening open space format where we had some lightening talks kicking off the night.

Maxime Coste kicked off with an excellent introduction to his code editor that he wrote in his spare time. It was hugely impressive. It is heavily inspired by vim.

Amazing that he had the tenacity to finish it off and grow a community from it. In particular I loved the little animations around key strokes. Would love to see it in vim.

Details here:

• vimeo overview
• github project

Next up was yours truly. Hard act to follow :) I gave a tooling overview of how I use sublime text for web development. This is a list of the plugins I mentioned on the night :

• AceJump Plugin
• Emmet Plugin
• ExpandRegion
• Expand Selection To Quotes
• JS-Hint
• Plain Tasks
• Bracket Highlighter

Keeping up to date winner.

Interesting discussion here. Lots of new languages/frameworks coming on board. General agreement was to really get to understand the foundations of software development. Really take the time to invest in software principles that can be applied everywhere. Clean code, DDD, refactoring techniques, always striving for simplicity and clarity and minimizing duplication.

Chatted about how a community is always a good approach for learning as it adds accountability. Tips for this:

• Setting up a book club in work
• Getting some of your colleagues to take on a coursera course together.
• If your work is not that interesting right now, start contributing to a open source project that leverages the languages you want to learn about.
• Going to meetups like this one.

Other topics we discussed on the evening were dealing with conflict.

Again some very useful insights here. Tips for dealing with this

• Speak with your boss, let it be known what the issues.
• Always favour ignorance over malice, the person who you are not in conflict with might not even know that they are being offensive. Have a one-to-one with them. Talk to the person about your interprations ‘I’m not sure if you meant it this way, but this is the way you came across…‘

Special thanks again to Barry Alistair in Techmeetup.space for providing the excellent venue. Also, thanks to Gerry from Stack and Co for sponsoring the craft beers for the evening.