Surviving Legacy Code with J. B. Rainsberger

ABOUT

DevConf, is partnering with J. B. Rainsberger to bring you an exclusive opportunity to learn the secrets of surviving legacy code. Platform 45 has kindly sponsored the venue and catering.

About this workshop...

Working with legacy code remains difficult. We feel afraid to change it, but sometimes we have no choice. Friends don't let friends remain afraid to change their code.

Learn key techniques to help you manage your risk. J. B. Rainsberger gives you a safe code base in which to experiment and guides you through the confusing risk/reward decisions involved in living with legacy code. You will learn and practise some specific, safe techniques that you can start using on your own legacy code once you return to your project. Although we will focus on code, surviving legacy code requires competence beyond refactoring and testing, so we will almost certainly discuss some of those issues too.

You should join this workshop if you have code that seems impossible to change, code that you feel really uncomfortable changing, or you want to avoid creating code like it in the future. J. B.'s advice transcends business domains and programming languages. You have the opportunity to discuss your own tough choices as well as learn from discussing those of your fellow participants. You will leave the workshop with increased confidence in your ability to improve your designs with (relative) grace and ease. All you need is your laptop, a working development environment for your favourite programming language and to install git. (Strictly speaking, you don't even need to do that, but you probably should.)

The practice code base is available in (at least) bash, C#, C++, C, COBOL, Clojure, CoffeeScript, D, F#, Go, Groovy, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Lua, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, PowerShell, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Smalltalk, Swift, Typescript, and VB6.

You don't need to know any fancy frameworks. (That's probably part of what got you into trouble in the first place.) You don't even need testing libraries, although you really should probably find one and install it.

About the Facilitator: J. B. Rainsberger

J. B. Rainsberger has built software, advised companies, turbo-charged careers, and delighted audiences since 1998. When people ask J. B. whether he fixes computers, he answers, "No; I fix programmers." His work began as a programmer, software designer and architect, and has since extended far beyond code to include the social, psychological and fiscal aspects of the software industry. He loves Extreme Programming, but doesn't care where great ideas comes from. He retired in 2008 and began travelling the world helping companies for profit and helping people improve their own lives at work in his abundant spare time. If you'd like to inspire your audience of software professionals, then J. B. can help you achieve exactly that.

J. B. is the keynote speaker for DevConf 2020.

About Platform45, your venue hosts

At Platform45 we promote ideation, we collaborate, we “iterate-iterate-iterate”, and above all, we build things that matter. More and more we are seeing software becoming an integral part of any business wanting to do better, grow faster, and offer their customers “one source of truth”. We know the power of incredible software and the potential it has to change the world. We’ve been at it since 2008 building platforms for FinTech start-ups, mining giants, pioneering entrepreneurs and telecom companies.

About DevConf

DevConf is a community-driven, professional software developer focused, one-day conference hosted annually. DevConf provides professional software developers with a buffet of tools, practices and principles applicable to tackling current and future challenges in the South African software development environment. It's an event where attendees can learn, network and be inspired regardless of their specific technology stack and programming language of choice.

DevConf takes place in Cape Town on 31 March 2020, and Johannesburg on 02 April 2020. Tickets and more information can be found at www.devconf.co.za.

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