XP Manchester 111 – Patterns relevance in a serverless/microservice world

For the last four years XP Manchester has been running debates on topics such as “is TDD dead?”, “The case against Cucumber”, the merits of #NoEstimates and branching vs trunk based development.

This year we asked for your input and one of our regulars suggested “in a world of microservices and serverless functions, are clean code and patterns still relevant?”

This month we’re at Sorted Group’s office just off Albert Square. Doors open at 6.30 to start at 7pm.

Tickets available here

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Debate Subjects

This month we’re looking to run another debate at xpmanchester.

In previous years we’ve debated “is TDD dead?”, “The case against Cucumber”, the merits of #NoEstimates and branching vs trunk based development.

We’re after suggestions and volunteers for other things to debate this year.

Why debate?

Our careers depend greatly on being able to make value judgements between two or more competing options, often the options come with supporters or detractors. Supporters or detractors that can make convincing sounding, yet fallacious arguments…

By participating in debates and entertaining ideas that we don’t necessarily immediately agree with, we are hoping to improve our critical thinking and reasoning.

We don’t want to just look for supporting evidence for our current stand point, we want to challenge it. Other smart people have come to different conclusions and tooling and processes and languages – what have they seen that we have missed?

The aim of the session isn’t necessarily to win the argument, or to beat our opponents into submission with our force of will, but to examine our thinking and the thinking of our colleagues. Where might have we missed a vital piece of information, made an incorrect assumption, or incorrectly linked some things?

Like the software that we write, our thought processes and conclusions are a series of connected pieces of logic, and it definitely contains some bugs that we wrote.

XP Manchester 110 – ROI and refactoring

This month we’ll be learning about how to get the most bang for your buck when deciding which areas of a code base to improve.

Doors open at 6.30 to start at 7. This is a practical session so bring a laptop.

Tickets available here.

#xpman 109 – Ranty Lightning Talks

July is lightning talk month, but this year they have a little spin on them.

Inspired by FFSConf, these talks will be a little ranty, possibly quite sweary, and complete with an ‘off-the-record’ policy. The talks won’t be recorded and we ask attendees not to tweet quotes or photos of the presenter.

Although we hope for world class level rants, our speakers will be ranting _for_ something, they won’t be allowed to say something is completely crap without giving alternative suggestions.

Some titles of the rants –

• Aarrrrrghhhnemic Domains
• FFS Stand up for Yourselves
• FFS Learn to use Make
• Promises in Progress
• Your mockups are f*cking lying to you

Join us on Thursday 11th, we’ll be at Valtech offices from 18:30 for a 19:00 start.

Grab a ticket

Lightning Ran^H^H^H Talks July 11th – call for speakers! #xpman

Many of the interesting discussions from the group happen after the session has ended, when a group member asks a probing question or (more usually) takes off on an unscripted rant about something that bugs them that they see happening constantly.

The theme for this month’s lightning talks is _lovingly_ plagiarised from FFS Conf. We’re asking for ranty – possibly sweary – and hopefully entertaining lightning talks from people.

It’s an ‘off the record evening’ – meaning we’ll have a strict no photo/tweeting policy about what is said at the talks and no talks will be recorded. We want people to speak their mind about what annoys them about xp or agile. What mistakes do the speakers keep see being made? What can be done about them?

We’re asking that the talks don’t just focus on the negative aspects though. If something is crap (and we want you to call out the things that are) offer up some counter examples of how things could be better. Whilst we want the talks to be cathartic, we’re also hoping that they will be useful and productive ;)

We only have a couple of volunteers so far, and would love to see some new speakers join us, if you have any ideas of things you could rant about for 5-15 minutes (constructively…) please get in contact.

Message us on twitter @xpmanchester or email markkirschstein at gmail dot com.

#xpman 108 – Baby Steps Kata

It’s been said before if you can take steps that are too small, you can almost certainly take steps that are the right size.

Ian Howarth will be working us through the Baby Steps Kata – a hands-on session to encourage working in the smallest possible increments.

You will need…

– A laptop
– A development environment
– A unit testing framework for that environment
– A version control system (preferably git)
– A stopwatch/timer (most smart-phones will be fine)
– A pen & paper

We’re at co-op’s offices in Federation House

18:30 for a 19:00 start

Grab a ticket

XP Manchester 107 – A Case for Outside-In Design

This month we have a talk from Sandro Mancuso from Codurance called A Case for Outside-In Design.

Software design should enable business agility, but often we have a mismatch between product and software design. In this talk, Sandro will describe how a software design approach focused on behaviour, external interactions and business flows can enable better collaboration between business and technology. This talk focuses on techniques that create a bigger overlap between product and software design and, at the same time, produce an Agile architecture that is more resilient, focused and fully aligned to business goals.

Doors open from 6.30 to start at 7pm at BrightHR’s offices.

Tickets available here.