You may remember that back in December, Clearcode held its first Beer and Bacon Meetup – an organized internal presentation and discussion event for employees. And because the first one was so successful, it was only natural to hold another one.
Clearcode’s 2nd Beer and Bacon Meetup was held on Friday, the 6th of March, 2015.
This meetup again saw 2 lightning talks and 2 presentations featuring all new faces.
The Lightning Talks
PhpStorm
By Konrad Pawlikowski, PHP Developer
Konrad’s lightening talk focused on PhpStorm and its usage in application development. PhpStorm is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for the PHP programming language and provides developers with many features and benefits, such as: an editor for PHP, JavaScript and HTML that provides refactorings and on-the-fly error prevention, debugging and testing capabilities, and a development environment that enables the developer to perform many routine tasks straight from the IDE.
During his lightning talk, Konrad shared tips and tricks on how to use PhpStorm more effectively and faster, and listed the benefits of PhpStorm to help change the way developers use Integrated Development Environments.
Bullet Journal, Kanban, ToDos, Inbox zero – good and bad practises.
By Maciej Zawadziński, CEO at Clearcode
Time and task management apps are an important tool in any busy software professional’s toolbox, and who would know more about this than Clearcode’s own CEO, Maciej Zawadziński. Maciej’s lightning talk centered on describing each tool, highlighting their benefits in software development and time management, and outline the good and bad practises of each. The tools Maciej described include:
Bullet Journal: Bullet Journal is an analog system that helps you organize tasks, events and notes on a daily and monthly basis. However, you won’t find the Bullet Journal on any app store or available to download on any website; the only 2 tools needed for the Bullet Journal are a pen and a notebook.
Want to learn how the Bullet Journal works? Click here to watch the video.
Kanban: For those of you who develop software according to the agile methodologies, you will be very familiar with Kanban, and the Kanban Board. For those who don’t, here is a brief description: Kanban is an agile framework used in software development to help developers, project managers and clients track the progress of certain tasks. The tasks are represented on a Kanban Board and are organized into different stages (e.g. To Do, Doing, Done). The Kanban Board provides everyone with a clear overview of the progress of each task within a project. You can use an “Agile” extension to JIRA or a third-party app such as Trello, which Maciej discussed in his lightening talk.
To Dos: To-do lists are essential for identifying what tasks need to be done, when, and by whom. Emails containing to-do lists are often forgotten or skipped over, spreadsheets are obsolete, and sticky notes end up travelling around on the bottom of someone’s shoe. There are a number of apps that add ease to the to-do process, help everyone stay on top of their work, and provide a snapshot of the team’s tasks. An interesting approach to managing a to-do list is to create a Trello board with weekdays as columns. This way, you can organize a whole week and review it on a single screen. On top of that, you can use labels to categorize and prioritise the tasks.
Inbox zero: Email is by far the most popular form of communication in the workplace. It is also the most popular place to spend minutes, even hours, of your day sifting through messages from co-workers and clients. Inbox zero is a systematic approach to email management and helps people become more efficient and productive. Created by Merlin Mann, the Inbox zero system works on five actions – delete, delegate, respond,defer and do.
Click here to learn more about Inbox zero.
The Presentations
Hexagonal architecture
By Paweł Barański, Software Manager
In software development, an application’s architecture provides the structure needed to build, add and change new pieces of the software and helps the various parts of the software communicate with one another, among other things.
In Paweł’s presentation, he ran through the core principles behind hexagonal architecture, the benefits it adds to software development, and talked about his own experience with hexagonal architecture in his work as a software manager.
To learn more about hexagonal architecture, check out Chris Fidao’s article about it or watch his presentation.
“Watch your language, young man!” – A short story about the impact of language on modern software craftsmanship.
By Paweł Wacławczyk, PHP Developer
Language is an important part of software development, whether it is the spoken kind or the kind you use to create applications. And while programming languages are the building blocks of software development, spoken languages can also determine the speed, accuracy and quality of a software project.
Paweł’s aim was to highlight the fact that in software development, it is not only important to have the right technical skills, but also to have the right soft skills, like natural language. Through the use of his SlideShare presentation, Paweł discussed the benefits that language-based skills have on software development and the big improvements they can make to the whole development process. During his presentation, he also provided examples of how modern software development methodologies are now putting a big effort on language.
To view Paweł’s SlideShare presentation, click here.
That’s all for this edition of Clearcode’s Beer & Bacon Meetup.
Stay tuned for the next meetup!
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