Juan Delgado

Product vs Craft

03 May 2016

It’s only in a week’s time that I will kick off at Agile Manchester a series of talks around the topic of craft in the software industry. The talk is titled “Product vs Craft” and the main premise is this:

Effective software engineers should adapt the way they develop software based on the product vision and at which point in the life cycle the product is.

In a business / commercial context, which is where most of software is being developed these days, code should be a means to an end and not an end in itself.

Sadly, in the last few years a big part of the industry has taken a blanket approach to software development by which you are either executing to the highest of your abilities at all times or you are doing it wrong.

But I believe that software has a context and that it should influence or even define your coding practices.

So if you are up for the discussion, please give me a shout on Twitter or if you happen to be around any of the conferences or meetups below please say hi because I don’t have the secret key to software development, I also struggle with these things! I really, really want to know how other people deal with these tensions.

• 11th May, Agile Manchester.
• 13th May, NCrafts, Paris.
• 2nd June, Agile Delivery, London.
• 15th June, London Software Crafsmanship Community.
• 16th June, Modern Web Event, Bilbao.
• 28th July, NSLondon.
• 27th October, Droidcon UK, London.

If you happen to be an organiser and think this would be an interesting topic for your conference get in touch, always happy to keep the conversation going if it fits around professional and family duties.

UPDATE

The good folks behind NCrafts have published the recording, so if you missed the talk you can check it out now on their site: Product vs Craft at NCrafts.

Also, attendees have asked for links mentioned during the talk, so here they come:

• Jocelyn Goldfein’s experience about the ‘right’ way of building software.
• Cross build injection (XBI) explanation at Oredev 2014. Watch the whole talk, learning about security is worth it!
• Making robust software, aka, what it takes to put car-sized robots in Mars.
• Carlo Pescio’s Software Design and the Physics of Software talk at DDD Europe.
• Enough front and back, it’s all about the product.
• Product vs Craft on the ustwo blog.
• A slightly modified version of the slides as a PDF that can be clicked through without me speaking and still make some sense. These are more for the people that have attended one of the conferences and just want to remember something. If you haven’t watched it I’d avise to go through the recording instead.

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