4th Preston Computer Programmers Meetup 12th July 2016
We celebrated our 6 month anniversary last night with 9 programmers in attendance.
The format for the meetup was lean coffee; where we all came up with some topics to discuss, voted on them and then talked through them over coffee and biscuits.
Venue
- Cotton Court Business Centre, Church Street, Preston, PR1 3BY, Preston (map)
Who was there?
First timers
- Stephen
- Imran
- Graham Templeton
- Nick
Old hands
- Mike Kelly (4 meetups)
- Dan Kelly (4 meetups)
- Simon Nagaitis (4 meetups)
- Sean Cleaver (2 meetups)
- Norbertas Petreikis (2 meetups)
What did we discuss
Mob Programming
Simon has read about Mob programming and was interested in seeing if any of us had tried it, and/or what our thoughts on it were
- like pair programming but for larger groups
- teams of 5-12
- could work for solving requirements issues
- brainstorming with code
Coding Kata
I (Mike) was interested in other developers techniques for improving and retaining knowledge of programming languages. In martial arts they have Kata, a set of moves that are practised to perfection to re-enforce techniques and to commit them to muscle memory. Is there something similar for programmers?
- The Art of Unit Testing
- TDD Kata
- Codewars.com
- Design Patterns
- Common language for programmers
TDD Usage in the real world
Nick was interested in our experiences using TDD commercially
- Continuous Integration, automating all the things
- Test coverage
- Refactoring old code base
- Who should be writing tests > BDD, Specflow
- Being asked in interview then never using on the job
- First thing to get axed when time is short, false economy?
Machine Learning any practical applications?
Dan is learning it at the moment via Coursera and University of Washington
- All just statistics
- Big Data
- Amazon reviews. sentiment analysers
.Net Core, ASP.net 5/6 discuss migrating projects
Sean is rewriting an old web-forms app with .Net core
- Cross Platform
- seems to just work
- Developed in VS2015
DevOps with Docker is anyone using it
Graham is using Docker for a new product he’s developing to make deployments easier
- Eases deployments
- Stephen is using for development and quickly spinning up dev environments on Macbook Pro, but not using in production
- Concerns over database changes, Docker scripts the answer
Hybrid Mobile Web Apps
I (Mike) was interested in peoples views on Mobile apps build with web tech vs native applications and what issues, if any people have faced with both approaches.
- Native may be better for performance
- If not a polished experience don’t bother
- Phonegap app slow
- Android UI easier than iOS
- Just ship it, users don’t care so long as it works
Brexit - Good or Bad for programmers
Simon was interested on how we all saw Brexit with regards to how we get work in the future
- Could create opportunities for contractors as per 2008 with freeze on perm hiring
- Could limit opportunities as finance puts investment on hold
- If London stops being a startup hub will the opportunities move to EU, Germany etc
- Limit opportunity for contracts in EU etc
- Could it help re-balance the economy and move focus away from London to places like Manchester
- Basically a big question no one knows the answer to.
Take homes
- Format is good, gets everyone involved lots of information shared
- More new faces
- Move time to 7pm for next one to make it easier for people to attend
- Arrange a more social component either for after lean coffee or on another night so people can meet and chat
- Could look at doing a Mob programming session at a meetup as an experiment, possibly with a coding kata
Link to the Trello board with the cards on, if you want to add any details or links please feel free.
Summary
Another good meetup with 4 new faces, good variety of topics discussed and a lot of further reading to do.
All future meetups will be hash tagged on twitter with #prestonprogrammers if you want to keep up to date outside of Meetup.