Some highlights from Devsummit 2007

Well that's Devsummit over for another year, and I think it was very nice, as always. I'd like to write a few words about what I thought some of the highlights were.

Andreas Brink spoke about how maintenance of legacy code is potentially actually more interesting, challenging and fun than developing new code. He also pointed out that to get use out of TDD, you must first be at a certain level for wanting to create nice, clean code (or at least it helps a lot if you are).

One of my colleagues at factor10, Niclas Nilsson, gave the keynote with the title "Dynamic Languages for Statically Typed Minds". There was one thing in his talk (OK, probably a lot of things, but this is the one I recall) that I hadn't before thought about at all. In Ruby it's easy to redefine the visibility of a method from private to public for testing purposes. This was just one small detail in his talk of course, but I started to think about how much pain I quite often go through regarding this in legacy code.

The unplanned, but common, theme of the architecture track day one was collaboration between different groups and that was definitely the theme of my talk as well. I hear about "us and them" in different projects all the time, but in my opinion a move to "all of us" is what we should be striving for. (No, I’m not saying that there should just be one huge über-project for dealing with every need or anything... but within a project, getting everyone to really collaborate, that's what I'm talking about.) But enough of open-door-kicking-in.