Leaving London and keeping in touch

At the beginning of the beginning of the year Megan and I had our first child Emily and moved to Bedford. This sounds more severe than it actually was, the commute down from Bedford to Kings Cross is only around 40 minutes. It's been a busy 6 months since then working on multiple projects with Stackthread, getting promoted to Vice President at the firm and as you can imagine not too much sleep.

As a family, we have decided to take a step which will involve us spending a lot more time together - but sadly means that I will be leaving London as a work hub. Having just completed major project milestones at the bank I work for, I decided it was time for a change of roles and found an exciting opportunity in Milton Keynes. From a personal perspective this also cuts down a 2 hour commute (each way to Canary Wharf) to 20 minutes, and reduces my outgoing costs on expensive rail tickets.

This has left me with many decisions to make about what projects to keep working on in London and how to keep in touch with specifically the London Java Community and the London Java Community Process Committee. For now, I'm not going to make any rash decisions and see how things pan out in terms of time available and what I realistically commit to. With ever limited time, I am trying not to spread my contributions too thinly and want to ensure that whatever I do chose to work on in the next few years has a solid impact.

Currently, I next plan to be in London on:

• 29th-30th October for JAX London.
• One Saturday towards the end of November for the LJC Open Conference

JAX London 2013 - TDD: The Benefits are more than just the tests

An introduction to my talk at JAX 2013 - also published here.

Back when I first started my career as a developer following University I was unleashed with little training in best practices, development methodologies or what to expect from the uncertainties in real world development. Before I could start to learn all these things I was quickly placed in my first job. The type of role I was placed into was fix problems and develop new features - with only guidance relating to the specific tasks at hand. There was no training on industry best practices, which underpin the quality of the software as professionals we strive to deliver - my own development languished.

Several years on, in my own time and through quizzing various industry leading technologists like Sandro Mancuso (at JAX London 2012) and Martijn Verburg (at numerous beverage centric establishments) I started to discover my personal points of improvement. I realised that there were steps I could take to improve the approaches I had in my toolbox for software problems. I took a look at my peers and people that were applying for job roles. Many listed Test Drive Development (TDD) as something that they used on a regular basis. I very quickly realised that a lot of people claim to practice TDD, but either don't do this at all or write integration tests rather than unit tests, as well as other ideas about what TDD is.

My talk at JAX London 2013 is designed for developers who have been too busy to appreciate the less obvious benefits of TDD, particularly the side effects and task breakdown from a cognitive perspective. The session will cover the basics of TDD, the use of mocking and how this helps break up the coding complexity using code and architecture examples. I will also convey my own experience of converting to TDD along with the benefits I have realised and how to convince developers who don't want to test the approach has merits outside of just high test coverage. The talk does not aim to sell TDD, but instead present facts and experiences that I have gained over the last year so developers can form their own opinions.

From taking these steps myself I produce code closer to the requirements, more maintainable code that is able to respond quickly to changes and my colleagues can look at the code and tests and quickly understand what is going on. Conferences are often the catalyst for personal improvement, and people interested in this space but haven't had time to explore it themselves will get some good practical advice on how to get going and what to expect.