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Later this month, I’ll be speaking at the DFW Scrum – Technical Edition meetup in Dallas, TX. They meet at Improving Enterprises (some really nice new offices!) Come check it out! If you’ve seen this talk before, this is updated for 2017 and is much more focused on strategies for unit testing those hard to reach places. We’ll look at working with Mocks, Dependency Injection – and look at some strategies for testing statics and extension methods.

Here is the “official description”:

Code coverage with quality unit tests are your first line of defense to reducing technical debt, increasing code quality and accelerating your ability to change and adapt code (without breaking it) while continuing to add new features. Most TDD sessions focus on the easy to test areas of your code base that are almost never what you experience getting back to your desk. Come learn why TDD is not a fancy practice for the coding elite, but an understandable, obtainable and practical approach to delivering value for every developer, and how, when done properly, will increase communication and design between the business stake holders and developers.

We will focus on practical steps to moving towards & embracing TDD. We’ll overview the normal roadblocks that people typically run in to, and practical coding strategies to overcome those road blocks on your way to embracing a Test Driven Development lifestyle – make coding without tests as uncomfortable as coding (or camping) naked! From the author of Automated Unit Tests chapter in the Wrox Book “Real World .NET, C# and Silverlight – Indispensable Experience from 15 MVPs, we will learn:

  • Distinguish between the 4 major elements of automated unit tests. Code, Tests, Testing Framework and Test Runners and how they interact with each other to round out your engineering practices.
  • Discover how Mocking Frameworks and DI make your tests easier to read and write in everyday life.
  • Dig in to better ways to write and organize your tests so that they communicate intent, document your code for you and bridge the gap between development and business needs.
  • We’ll take a more specific look at those “hard to reach” places like the edges of your code, extension methods and other interesting scenarios

* everyone will leave their cloths on – it’s not that kind of talk!

I recently gave this talk at the internal Software Craftsmanship community for Quicken Loans in Detroit – and we all had a great time. If you’re not in Dallas, this is one of the talks I’ll be giving at Detroit Code in July.

Last Friday I was privileged to give the closing keynote at the Tulsa Tech Fest. In the past I’ve spoken about things like building a great culture, 10 practices that all developers should be doing – even talks specifically about dependency injection and refactoring code. This year it was more about Why all of this stuff matters.

As a developer, it’s easy to think about how big the universe is, how much there is to do, and wonder if these things really matter. So we take a look at some examples in our industry on why UX matters, Clean Code, Secure Coding, Engineering Practices, Building a Culture, Continuous Learning.. and finally, being a Professional. These things matter.

 

If you were there – hope you enjoyed it!

 

I also gave 2 other talks that day.

 

Scaling Scrum

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Prototyping, Innovate Collaborate

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In addition, several people from my new job found out that I was speaking in Tulsa, and pulled together to create an entirely new track this year! So cool. More about Linux Academy and my new job coming soon!

 

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Tomorrow night I’ll be speaking at the Tulsa .NET User Group covering Dependency Injection for Modern Applications. This talk is a lot of fun, and you’ll walk away better equipped to write better software and conquer the world! I love the community in Tulsa, as a former president of the Tulsa DNUG, frequent speaker and keynoter at the Tulsa Tech Fest, in a lot of ways – going to Tulsa is like going home.

 

I’m looking forward to seeing the familiar friends, and meeting new ones! If you’re new to dependency injection, this talk is the perfect primer. If you’re already using DI, then this should solidify what you already know, and might even introduce you to some new concepts.  Here are the slides and code, if you’d like an early peek.

 

The single greatest thing that you can do to make your code more testable and healthy is to start taking a Dependency Injection approach to writing software

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–Real World .NET, C# and Silverlight
Wrox Press 2012

Be sure to RSVP so they know you’re coming!

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Thursday April, 14th, I’ll be speaking at the Dallas .NET User Group.

This talk introduces the concepts of factories, strategy pattern, Inversion of Control, dependency injection and several of the available frameworks.  We’ll also look at common dependency injection patterns and various IoC/DI frameworks, the pros & cons, practical steps and guidance as well some of the real world scenarios with impact to unit testing and application architecture.

The single greatest thing that you can do to make your code more testable and healthy is to start taking a Dependency Injection approach to writing software

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–Real World .NET, C# and Silverlight
Wrox Press 2012

I gave this talk last month at the Ft. Worth .NET User Group, and this was one of my favorite comments from there:

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If you’d like a preview, here are the slides on Slideshare, and the demo code on Github.

Be sure to RSVP – Hope to see you there!

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Tomorrow night I’ll be speaking at the Ft. Worth .NET Users Group.  I’m really looking forward to this talk, this is an updated talk to something I first did over 8 years ago! I guess good software practices really do endure.  This is one of the talks that I was going to give at the Dallas Tech Fest (if one of my daughter’s birthday wasn’t on the same day).

The Ft. Worth Group is a great community – and BONUS: Looks like they’re meeting at an awesome resteraunt tomorrow near the 7th street district – the fun starts at 6 – if you are in the DFW area you should make the drive out! Be sure to RSVP so they know you’ll be there.

 

I’ll be updating my slides here soon.. but nothing is going to compare to the live experience. 😉

Update (3/16/16): Here are my slides, code should be on GitHub later this week!

Update: (3/20/2016): Code posted to GitHub – Enjoy!

Update: If you missed this talk, I’ll be giving an updated version at the next Dallas .NET User Group – Hope you can make it!

Tomorrow (Monday, Sept 14th) – I’ll be presenting at the Oklahoma City C# Group (MeetUp). This will be a slightly revised version of my keynote that I did at the Tulsa Tech Fest. I really like the changes and I’m looking forward to spending some time with the folks in OKC! This is a lunch time group – they meet at 11:30 – so make sure to clear your lunch time schedule.

This talk goes in to my own philosophy of work, with some good patterns and anti-patterns for development, building team and having a great culture. Hope to see you there!

Update: Use the OKC# meet up site to register, and for updates.

Post event update:

Looks like most everyone enjoyed the talk! BTW – this is a really cool space that Techlahoma has secured for most of the user groups in OKC to use. Really love to see the collaboration and cooperation among so many “different” technology communities! Thank you all for being there, and for the great time.

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Last Friday I had the privilege of attending and speaking at the 10th annual Tulsa Tech Fest. #ttf2015

Here are my slides to the closing keynote: Get Your Hero Groove On. This is where I try to inspire people to take advantage of the super powers that we have as developers to shape our world, influence our culture and chose the practices and processes to make that happen!

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This was a fun talk – I hope I get the chance to do this again and really dig in to some of these concepts.

I’m glad people seemed to have a good time!

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This was Tulsa’s 10th TechFest… I presented at the 1st one 10 years ago, at the following one and at least 3 other Tech Fests.. including doing the lunch time keynote 3 years ago.

 

Morning Keynote: 10 Reasons Your Software Sucks

I was originally only going to do the closing keynote, but 2 weeks ago, the morning keynote presenter had to drop out. I was bummed about that (since he’s a friend of mine, and I was looking forward to catch up). When David asked if I could cover the morning session, I was glad to had this talk ready to go!

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Twitter

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Things have changed a lot in 10 years.. twitter was a lot of fun to follow through out the day!

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Although the hashtag was being used by another event in Europe at the same time.. so this came up right after the closing keynote.. I have to admit, this is about how I felt.

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Extra huge thanks goes out to David for organizing this great event 10 years in a row.. and to the whole Tulsa community for making it happen!

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Last week I got to announce an upcoming talk that I will be giving in Denver, 10 Reasons your software sucks Denver Road Trip Edition! Well my Denver road trip has now turned in to a Colorado road trip as I will be speaking the very next night at the Boulder .NET User Group. This will be a fun night. We’ll be digging in to a very different skill set than most developer talks – looking at tools to help Prototype, Collaborate and Innovate using sketches, prototyping tools and Innovation games.

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Slides

Some of the resources we’ll be digging in to are:

Todd Zaki Warfel’s Prototyping book – go get it! Between his book, the Innovation Games, and Designing the Conversation (Awesome workshop guide by my friend Russ Unger)  you’ll get the meat that I’ll have to leave out of my *relatively* short talk.

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If you’re in the area – come check it out both talks!

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This is quite possibly my most popular talk of all time.

This was the key note at the Tulsa Tech Fest, a featured talk at the Sela Developer Conference in Tel’Aviv Israel and I’ve given this talk at multiple events around the United States.  I’m excited to head to the Rocky Mountain state later this month. I’ll be speaking at the Microsoft office in Denver on June 15th, 2015 talking about the 10 Reasons your software sucks, and the practices that you need to fix it.

If you’re in the Denver area…

first go attend the Denver Dev Day event (that I’m unfortunately missing by about a week), then come to the Denver Visual Studio Users Group on June 15th.. It’s going to be a great time! See you there.

Description

Fresh off of the European tour of “So You Think You Can Code,” * we bring you the hit sensation, 10 Practices Every Developer Needs to Start Right Now. Recently from off-Broadway, you are going to learn some new things and have a fun time learning them! (Seriously, Caleb recently gave this talk at the Microsoft office in New York… right off Broadway). Yes friends, this is the talk that kicked off a controversy at the 2010 Dallas Tech Fest, read the blog, see the slides… then come see and learn for yourself!

Based on years of consulting and working with some of the largest (and smallest) software companies in the world, these are the 10 practices that if you started doing today, would drastically improve the quality and delivery of your software!

* Caleb was never in Europe, but it’s still going to be a great session!

Topics hit on:

  • Object Oriented Principals
  • SOLID Coding
  • Security Concerns
  • Software Patterns
  • Automated Testing
  • Source Control – Branching and Merging Strategies
  • Continuous Integration
  • Agile, Scrum, XP, Lean
  • Team Dynamics
  • Continually Learning, and more

Be sure to hang around afterwards, Caleb will be around to discuss any of the areas from his talk in more detail — it’s going to be great time!

This Tuesday night (11/18/2014) the Ft. Worth .NET Users Group will host a panel discussion on the future of .NET and I’ll be there! If you’ve never been to the Ft. Worth DNUG I highly recommend it. Ft. Worth has a great community and a great group of people participate in the DNUG every month.

From their website:

If you have had a chance to keep up with the announcements that occurred on Wednesday 11/12/2014 and have questions regarding these announcements, this is the perfect meeting to ask. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, again, this is the perfect meeting for you to attend. In other words, this is a “if you are a .NET developer, you don’t want to miss this meeting”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I always enjoy participating in panels… it’s like presenting with out the need to really prepare. Winking smile The future of .NET is really exciting right now (you know you can go fork .NET core now right?)

Hope to see you there!

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