On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 4:01 PM MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
- how can we improve the quality of our software, and pay down the
technical debt we've accumulated over the years?
Pro: again, a favorite topic of talk-over-beers among developers. One could imagine a whole summit devoted to going through our software stack component by component, identifying the cruft hidden in each, and making concrete plans to banish it. Con: this opinion might be controversial, but my impression is that we're actually pretty good at low-level refactoring. There are plenty of things we are hesitant to change (say, wikitext syntax!), but I don't get the feeling that the barrier is in engineering. The problem is mostly a management one: how can engineering communicate the time spend and value added by "invisible" maintenance and refactoring; how can we get management to allocate more dedicates resources to this? I don't think there's much technical debate about what to work on, if we had the resources to do so.
I think this problem exists in most companies/organizations. Nobody wants to pay down technical debt; building new features is a lot more exciting.
Bummer. I think paying down tech debt is fun and way more rewarding than making shiny new things.
But I'm also weird as hell...
Ok, so what have we learned from this? Even if others have different opinions about each of Rob's proposed topics, which are the *sort* of things we'd like the dev summit to be about? Radical ideas? Stuff developers bitch over beers about? Vague umbrella topics ("make wiki easier to use") that we can crowd a bunch of stuff under? Something else entirely?
In my experience, the greatest value derived from these types of events (summits, hackathons, unconferences, whatever other cutesy word) is having unstructured time to explore and think and poke and discuss with people about pet projects and other neat ideas. The structured and more formal sessions, with their broad themes for whatever year it is, are usually boring and ill-fitting.
This. I usually find myself skipping most sessions. One of two things happen:
1) You sit there and listen to someone else talk to you, or 2) It's ostensibly a group discussion, but the group is too big and nothing useful gets discussed because you spend too much time listening to 30 different voices.
(1) bores me to tears. (2) is basically useless.
-Chad