Later today I’ll be speaking at the C# Corner 2022 .NET Conference. This is a 3-day FREE online conference with a great set of speakers. I’ve been really impressed with the quality of production and how the C# Corner team is really building a community with their articles, events and how they are encouraging people to get involved.

Slides | Sample Code

I’ll be speaking on unit testing strategies with my “Coding Naked – Unit Testing those hard to reach places” talk. I need to update the slides on SlideShare, these ones are a bit dated by now, if you watch the live steam or recording, you’ll see I’ve updated this talk quite a bit since I first put it together (in 2012!).

In addition to TDD fundamentals, I dig into a few strategies for better TDD and test coverage.

One area I address is working with extension methods. Extension methods can be hard to mock, or at least, they often get in the way. Extension methods that are “functionally pure” (input, output, no side effects) are pretty easy to unit test, the challenge are extension methods that return void, or that do a lot of work under the hood.

The three strategies I discuss for dealing with extension methods are:

  1. Wrapping Extensions with an Interface (my preferred approach)
  2. Mocking around Extension Methods (creates dev cognitive load, and leaky abstractions)
  3. Using Fakes, Pose or Isolator (I don’t recommend these)

You can download or fork the sample code on githuib.

One thing I recently added to the sample code, is a new method for mocking around a common extension method. The Microsoft.Logging.Extensions! I’m really glad that Microsoft has created a common logging interface. There are a lot of great .NET loggers.. but often moving from project to project the nuanced api differences can be really annoying. I’ve used the Common.Logging interface several times, but it never really took off the way I hoped it would. I think the Microsoft logging abstractions will have a much higher adoption. 🤞

Here’s the thing though. There is only 1 logging method in the Microsoft.Logg Interface, and you’ll likely never use it! Instead, you’ll end up using one of the many logging extension methods. So now you might try and mock around it since the source code is all available. This will lead you to a massive deep dive where you finally realize that all of the Microsoft Extensions, end up using a method call that takes an internal class as a parameter! Ugh. That makes it really hard to mock around!

That being said, MOQ recently added a parameter option for It.IsAnyType – huzzah! Adam Storr has a much more extensive write up on this challenge and the solution that he came up with (go read it!) to Mock Around the Microsoft Logging Abstractions. I extended his solution in my code, and am planning on publishing this as a reusable nuget package soon.

Happy Coding!

Like Inbox Zero, I'm trying to play catch up before the year starts! I like to keep a record of when I speak at places, as a nice reminder for me to look back on, and to promote events before they come up. I'm really working to stay more up to date, but honestly - over the last couple of years, I find that I've mostly been posting to LinkedIn and have been neglecting my own space. I often think about these walled gardens, as my friend Scott has said "Blog is the engine of your community" and "Why you need your own blog".  If you're following along and are already caught up on jobs - then let's jump into speaking events!

I spoke at QL Tech Con 2018 in Detroit in person

I’ve spoken about the Detroit Tech Con in the past. It’s a massive internal conference that Quicken Loans hosts every year., They take over Detroit’s largest convention center, bring in external speakers – it’s always a great event. If you ever get a chance to present or attend, I highly recommend it. This was my second time presenting. This time I was on an “agile panel” with a number of other technologists – both internal and external. It was a great time.

I spent 3 years commuting to Detroit – not just for Tech Con, check out rest of the photos!

IT Dev Connections in Dallas – Oct 15-18, 2018 in person

IT Dev Connections

I spoke on “Code to DI For” and patterns for “Scaling Scrum to the Enterprise“. One of the highlights of this conference was that we were in downtown Dallas, and my second oldest daughter got to come hang out with me for the week. We discovered the electric scooters that we

Dallas DNUG – June 13th, 2019 in person

The Dallas DNUG is one of the longest running .NET User groups in the country! Even during the pandemic, they continued to be active – moving their meetings to an online format. I spoke on 10 Reasons your software sucks.. I’m grateful to their leadership team, friends I’ve known since 2005! They continue to invest and grow this critical group.

DFW QA Association – June 16th, 2020 – on line

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One of the QA people at Solera connected me with the DFW QA Association, and I was able to present (online) at one of their sessions. I covered 10 Reasons your software sucks – a focus on 10 engineering practices every professional development team should grow in. I love finding pockets of communities and areas that I hadn’t connected with before!

Capital One’s Beyond DFW Conference – Nov 18th, 2019 in person

The awesome Marty Cagan gave a great keynote. It was great meeting him and I loved his way of thinking about product design and innovation. It’s definitely worth checking out his book. I was also able to bring my oldest daughter to attend the sessions – what a great experience for her! I’m grateful for my friend Stephen P. Anderson for inviting me to speak and letting me talk about 10 Power Ups for Scrum. Additional photos from that day.

DBU’s Tech Talks and DBU guest lecturer (twice), in person & on-line

I’m a big fan of the dual Master’s (MSITM) degree program that Sharon and his team have put together over at DBU. He frequently brings in external speakers from the industry so that his students leave with a solid foundation of the world they are stepping in to … not just academic theory.

Over the summer (pre-covid… in the before times) Sharon hosted a number of TechTalks at their Plano campus, open to the public. This was one of my last in person events (Feb 20th, 2020) before everything was shut down due to COVID. The two guest lectures I gave were both over Zoom. For the in person session, I gave 10 Power Ups for Scrum, my two online (July 29, 2020 & April 14th, 2021) talks focused on the same topic “Process Wont Save You” – that is, while various agile processes (Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, etc) each have their own strengths and purposes – to really get the agile benefits, they work best with agile engineering practices … TDD/BDD, CI/CD, SOLID Principles etc.. they all work synergistically together! Photos from the DBU TechTalk

Unlimited Agile Conference – Nov 4th, 2021 on-line

I was honored to be included as one of the presenters at the first annual Unlimited Agility Conferences. I was able to cover 10 Power Ups for Scrum. Organized by my friends Derek Lane and David Koontz are putting together quite a community (free to join) and regular on-line events to help grow your agility. Go check it out!

Wow.. that’s a lot of talks that I missed, here are 5 more that I’ve already blogged on:

I’ll be at Code Stock in April 2020


Code Stock was canceled that year – a casualty of the pandemic. I had planned on speaking on Scrum, and was also scheduled to speak on an agile “debate” panel. This was going to be my first time at Code Stock – my wife and I were really looking forward to being there and exploring Knoxville, TN!

Here’s to 2022 being even brighter than the last two years!

I’ll be presenting on “Scrum from the trenches – 10 Power Ups that work!” – this is a fun talk that digs into some areas that aren’t always obvious right away. Scrum is incomplete *by design* – these of some of the Scrum practices that I’ve found helpful over and over again in the last many years. As a technology leader, consultant and agile coach.
Slides

DFW Beyond is one of the Summit conferences that Capital One in Plano has been organizing. I’m really excited to attend and participate in a full day of great speakers. Like many conferences I speak at – one of the hardest parts is all of the great sessions and speakers that are on at the same time as me. Check out the schedule, register – and hope to see you there!

Tulsa TechFest 2018

What are you doing this Friday? Nope. Change your plans and come hang out in Tulsa. It’s time for the 13th Annual Tulsa Tech Fest. That’s right 13 years in a row! (not that I’ve been there every year – but a lot of them). Honestly, where else can you 17 tracks and 68 different sessions all for the price of a can of food (Every Year the Tulsa Tech Fest Community does a food drive as a part of the event… literally, bring a can of food, get in for free – it’s awesome!)

This year I’m opening and closing the Agile Track

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I’ll be kicking things off with an overview of Scrum and talk about some practical patterns and strategies to scale Scrum to larger Enterprises companies. We’ll also touch on frameworks like LeSS and SAFe.

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(slides)

Later in the day I’ll be giving a brand new talk that I recently debuted in Ft. Worth. It’s a lot of the tips and tricks that I’ve used through out the years to really make Scrum work.

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This talk is a lot of fun, and if you’re in the area – I think you’re really going to enjoy it. (slides coming soon)

Here’s the official description:

Scrum is the most popular Agile framework in the world for effective team collaboration on complex projects. Scrum provides a small set of rules that create just enough struterehcture for teams to be able to focus their innovation. By design Scrum is incomplete, come learn some of the tips and tricks (Power Moves) that have helped accelerate teams all over the world. 10 key moves that have been consistently helpful as Caleb has lead, consulted and coached Scrum teams world wide.
We’ll dive in to areas like, key ways to improve stand up, how to forecast and effectively communicate progress to the business, protect your quality and make the most of your Scrum team and the Scrum framework.

Though, as my friend Dave put it…

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Yeah.. he’s probably right about that.. See you there, and expect to see more than 10 Power Moves. Smile 

I’m really looking forward to presenting, meeting new people, seeing old friends, and all of the conversations that tend to surround these events.

Hope you can make it!

I’ll be presenting tonight on a topic that is near and dear to my heart: getting the most out of Scrum.

Official description:

Scrum is the most popular Agile framework in the world for effective team collaboration on complex projects. Scrum provides a small set of rules that create just enough struterehcture for teams to be able to focus their innovation. By design Scrum is incomplete, come learn some of the tips and tricks (Power Moves) that have helped accelerate teams all over the world. 10 key moves that have been consistently helpful as Caleb has lead, consulted and coached Scrum teams world wide.
We’ll dive in to areas like, key ways to improve stand up, how to forecast and effectively communicate progress to the business, protect your quality and make the most of your Scrum team and the Scrum framework.

I’m really excited to dig in to some real tangible tips that people can start using right away, also – if you’re never been to the Ft. Worth .NET User Group – they have a great venue! We’re meeting tonight at Chimy’s in Ft. Worth – big thanks to Tek Systems for sponsoring tonight and buying us all dinner. Awesome!

Note: I’ll be updating a link to my slides here later this week.

Hope to see you there!

I’ve never attended CodeMash – this conference has one of the best reputations of any conference around. So I’m humbled to have been selected as a speaker, and excited to be here this week. This is a crazy good line up of people, the hardest part is all the people I want to go hear.. that are speaking the same time as me!

Thursday I’ll be speaking on Coding Naked – Unit testing those hard to reach places

This is a fun talk that has evolved over the last couple of years, and I really like hat it’s become. I go in to multiple scenarios that are challenging and give practical patterns and solutions for increasing your Unit Test coverage and effectiveness. (slides)

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On Friday I’ll be talking about ways to Prototype, Collaborate and Innovate

This talk dips in to several of the techniques and “lessons learned” that we used and discovered when I lead the product design (UX) team over at GetThere (Sabre). This is a great talk for UX people, developers and product owners. Basically – anyone that needs to work with other people and improve how you communicate ideas. (slides)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings”
– Todd Zaki-Warfel Author of the Prototyping book.

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If you’re around – please stop by and say hi! Also, stay tuned – this being my first year at CodeMash, I’m hoping to blog a little about each day just to capture my thoughts and takeaways.

See you there!

Image Credit:

AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by Josh Holmes

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I know I’ve mentioned before how great it is to work for a company that provides time to attend and speak at various conferences. This is a whole next level.. Quicken Loans Technology group puts on their own annual conference that is truly a top notch 1 day conference. In addition to the speakers listed on the web site, I’ve also heard the likes of Steve Smith and Jim Holmes will also be presenting – I’m so pumped to be attending this! (and completely humbled to be presenting).

At QL Tech Conf I’ll be giving a UX’y talk

I’ll be sharing some of the lessons learned from when I ran the product design UX team at GetThere. We’ll be talking about how we used Innovation Games, rapid prototyping and design studios to better collaborate build better products. I really like the topics covered in this talk because they don’t just apply to UX teams. We’ve used Innovation Games to help facilitate retrospectives, organize team work and all sorts of contexts. I’ve found the prototyping techniques I’ll be covering useful whenever I need to communicate an idea or concept. Super handy for all dev and UX teams!

At MIGANG (Michigan Great lakes Area .NET Group) I’ll be speaking on Dependency Injection

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I love this talk. This is the talk I gave in Ft. Worth where someone commented “Had me laughing so hard I could hardly eat my nachos.” I went for nearly 10 years in my professional development career before I adopted a DI approach to authoring code… the techniques that I’ll be showing have had the single greatest impact on how I write software today. I’ve been giving this talk, in one form or another, for several years now. If you’re in the area, be sure to stop by, we’ll hit up the local pizza place afterwards and have a great time!

Detroit Code – 3 Days of Awesome.

July 7, 2017    Category: Blog, Events   1 Comment »

 

TL;DR:

Detroit.Code() is a 3 Day conference I’ll be giving two talks at in Detroit next week. You can register now and save 10% by using code CalebJenkins10

detroitcode

The rest..

Earlier this year I spoke twice at our internal Software Craftsmanship Community at Quicken Loans. Next week, I’ll be giving two more talks in Detroit. Coding Naked and Scaling Scrum.

I’m really looking forward to this “local” conference. It’s local for me since I started working in Detroit every day. Well, “in Detroit” is relative, my commute involves walking to my standing desk in Texas – more on that in a future post! OK, I really am excited to experience this conference. The speaker line up is amazing. The hardest part will be some of the time slots where there are way too many good speakers and topics I want to hear at the same time. Where else can you go spend a whole day learning about ASP.NET CORE directly from Microsoft’s Jeffrey Fritz or Do Architecture Kata’s with Ted Neward or spend a day learning directly from Ted X Speaker Christina Aldan? Seriously, here’s me trying to decide which session to attend in one slot

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Too many good talks to decide.

The only thing that made this one easy to pick, is that one of them I have to be at..

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You get the idea.. so much great content, learning, growing – mind stretching will be going on next week.

I’m also looking forward to seeing how the people from Amegala run a conference. They do a number of conferences that I’ve never been at before.

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This feels like a notch up from a TechFest, but not quite at the VS Live sort of level. In other words: just perfect.

Quicken Loans

imageI should also mention how awesome it is to work for a company that not only gives time off for attending a speaking at conferences.. but actively encourages broader community participation. Not only is Quicken Loans officially sponsoring Detroit Code, 6 of the speakers are from QL, many of us are from out of town, and QL is paying for our travel and hotel for the week. Awesome!

  • Keith Elder – will be flying up from Mississippi, and is talking about the highly scalable encryption platform that we built and use at Quicken Loans
  • Mike Eaton – is giving two talks, one on Becoming a Remote Worker Pro, and other on making the transition from individual contributor to  Team Leader (Manager outside of QL)
  • Peter Ritchie – 2 talks: Introduction to Microsoft Service Fabric, and Moving Towards Elastic Scalability
  • Jason Follas -  2 talks: Bit Coin: What makes it secure, and Lightweight Pub/Sub for Web Applications using MQTT
  • Eric Helin – Adventures with TDD and Paired Programming

 

I’ll be giving two talks:

Coding Naked – Unit Testing those hard to reach places.

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This is an updated version of this talk that I’ve given many times. The new version (updated slides coming soon) is much more focused on code examples and working through various scenarios that people run in to while at the same time delivering on the principles behind those examples to really help people get better at navigating the world of automated unit testing. Original slides: https://www.slideshare.net/calebjenkins/coding-naked

 

Scaling Scrum to the Enterprise

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Scrum is awesome.. just incomplete. (by design) – this talk goes through some of the patterns and practices that we used to scale scrum at Sabre to help people increase their over all agility and deliver better software.

 

There’s still time to register.

The full day workshops are on Monday with the rest of the conference taking place Tuesday and Wednesday. If you use the discount code CalebJenkins10, you’ll save 10% off of your registration.

 

Hope to see you there!

Dallas Tech Fest this Friday!

June 2, 2017    Category: Events   No Comments »

This Friday I’ll be speaking at the Dallas Tech Fest.
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My talk is called “Coding Naked – Unit Testing those hard to reach places!” – it’s all about better unit testing and strategies for tackling some of those not so obvious scenarios.

Hope you can make it!

I’ll be posting the updates to my slides here shortly after the conference.

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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.

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