Rowan is software engineer and team lead at Ibuildings and holds a Master's degree in Software Engineering. He's worked commercially with PHP for over 5 years with particular experience in the ISP industry, before that he was working with Python and Java. His work has encompassed everything from tiny interactive pages through to multi-million pound billing engines using a wide variety of open source technologies. Rowan is based in Sheffield, UK.
United Kingdom
United Kingdom 2012 sessions
Estimation or "How to Dig your own Grave" View session page
English session - Intermediate
Clients need to know how much a project will cost. Waterfall development is always late and over-budget. Agile development is done when it's done. You're left with estimates that you know are too low and then you squeeze them anyway. It shouldn't be this way. We'll look at how this happens, early warning signs, ways out and ways of avoiding it in the first place.
Living with Legacy Code View session page
English session - Intermediate
Legacy code is a burden that few developers are lucky enough to avoid in their professional lives. We'll look at how legacy code develops and some of the early warning signs to watch out for. Where it's already a problem, we'll explore the strategies that can be used to replace, isolate or integrate that code and some practical methods for achieving it. This talk will weigh these ideas up in terms of time and cost to help you take a pragmatic approach to taming or slaying your monster.
TDD and Getting Paid View session page
English session - Intermediate
Test-driven development is generally regarded as a good move: it should result in simple decoupled design, your tests tend to cover behaviour not methods, and far fewer bugs. However, just getting unit tests in on a real, commercial project is hard - switching to TDD is even harder. We'll examine how we can make small but permanent steps towards full TDD, without losing that progress when deadlines hit. We'll also cover a few methods for learning on your own time and how the whole process can actually be made quite enjoyable.
