Newsletter - November 2019

Hello!

October proved to be an exciting month for Codurance, with 8 new hires joining us in a variety of roles. We had the opportunity to gather all of our UK-based colleagues in one place via a company Open Space day, where all were encouraged to engage in discussions across a variety of topics. These bi-monthly events are an essential component of what makes life at Codurance special and the wonderful feedback from our team reflected this.

In this month's newsletter, David Hall provides a recap on a very successful SC London 2019, we provide examples of useful walkthroughs such as Andre Torres' introduction to the Elastic Stack and recommend some great reading materials.  

Until next time,  The Codurance team

Our Reflection on SC London 2019

By David Hall

SC London 2019 took place on the 3rd and 4th October. For the third year running, we were delighted to bring together amazing speakers, sponsors and attendees from across the world. Our talks this year covered a broad range of topics, from Sandro Mancuso on aligning product and technology design through to Aslak Helesoy on TDD with Petri nets. If you haven’t seen them already, make sure to check out all of the videos from this year’s event, here.

Several people had asked about how to find a local Craftsmanship community. The Software Crafters Slack channel is a good place to start. For those that are interested in starting their own community, Sandro’s article from 2013 contains lots of useful advice. 

We are busy working through the feedback and will be making an announcement about SC London 2020 very soon. Make sure to keep an eye out on Twitter, or sign-up to the mailing list, here.

Balancing Forces in Software Design

Recorded at SC London Conference 2019, Codurance co-founder Mash Badar explores the conflicting forces that Craftspeople should aim to balance when designing software. 

Building the Web

Jeremy Keith's inspiring interview with Smashing Magazine on the essential skills required for front-end developers and the future of the web. 

How to Solve it - Crafting web apps using finite state machines - Part I

Dan Bunea’s blog post contains the strategy and methods that can be employed to craft robust web apps, with practical code examples to further illustrate the process.

Big Ball of Mud

Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder’s seminal paper assesses the commonly emerging influences that create haphazardly structured software architecture. The authors discuss these influences and suggest the remedies and processes that can be put into place by architects to create durable, evolving software.   

Elastic Stack Introduction

Andre Torres’ piece introduces the components of the Elastic Stack, how to start using them and the importance of having your logs organised - a useful reference point for beginning to collect and analyse your logs. 

Parsing Bash Script Options with Getopts

Kevin Sookocheff provides a handy explanation of the getopts function within Bash to make a script that parses command line arguments. 

Codurance is hosting events to celebrate the Global Day of Code Retreat on Saturday 16th November! Join us in London and Barcelona to take part in focused practice with like-minded developers. 

Codurance Talks

Our latest updates are out now, including an episode on the topic of learning, featuring TechBeat.io’s founder George Koulouris. 

Troubleshooting Agile

Troubleshooting Agile is a podcast for agile teams, covering commonly experienced issues and the practical solutions listeners can put into place to alleviate their problems.  

Calling all budding functional programmers! We're hosting a 2 day course in November to teach some of the basics of functional programming for those who already coding proficient.

This beta-run of our new course is now fully booked; however, we encourage all who are interested in future sessions to register their interest, here. 

Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

Michael T. Nygard’s book provides an essential introductory read to building software that can be deployed and maintained as smoothly as possible. We recommend the second edition. 

Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations

Accelerate presents the research from Dr Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim on measuring software delivery performance, highlighting the importance of Software Craftsmanship principles to aid the competitive advantage of businesses.