On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 4:01 PM MZMcBride <z(a)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