Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Playing 'Developer'

I'm a gamer, and some of my favourite articles to read about computer games are those click-bait posts that read "Ten Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Playing Pac-Man!".

When you're playing computer games, it's easy to miss things that are obvious to others, and these posts can help you to understand a simple game mechanic that you'd otherwise have not used.

It got me thinking about the things in my own career that I found out about too late, or didn't fully understand until much later than I needed it.

We'll cover both the technical and the conversational, so join me, as I introduce you to Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Playing "Developer".

Git advanced

You're a software development consultant called into DevCorp with a mission. What started as a hip, informal startup now has investor demands to meet. And they're counting on you to help them become a scale-up. How do you grow the existing team and maintain the codebase?

This interactive talk, intended for any developer of any level, will give you some valuable technical and soft skills to take with you on your real-life professional journey. Using a voting system, the audience decides... and has to live with the consequences. Based on a mix of personal experience, agile methodology, and software design principles, this story has several possible endings.

Will you help lift your team's performance or run DevCorp into the ground?

PWA Fundamentals: websites with superpowers

The term Progressive Web Apps was already coined in 2015 and nowadays the browser support for it is excellent, so it's really time to embrace it.

This talk brings you up to speed about the importance and benefits of turning your website or web app into a PWA and gives you practical information on how to do that.

Ever heard of Manifest File, Service Workers, Cache API or Fetch API? We'll walk through these key features one by one.

Hack The System: Common ways to attack your platform

Security is a common concern at the moment. There are regular stories about companies large and small having their applications hacked, data being leaked, and cards being stolen.

Any application could be targeted, and as developers we are responsible for ensuring that the data our users provide us remains secure.

Thankfully, there are common patterns and vectors that are used, and by knowing the basics of these, you can protect your application from a large number of such attacks.

Join Liam as he demonstrates some of these common vectors, and discusses how you can protect against them.

Asynchronous PHP

Your script is constantly waiting. For the database, the e-mail server, the HTTP server of any service, a file from the disk or even for the RAM. And with it the customers wait.

I want to show how with an asynchronous architecture, RabbitMQ and ReactPHP the waiting time is significantly shortened and that sometimes you do not have to wait.

Embrace the pitfalls (Our stop start journey to Change)

However, many companies are still at the start of their journey. Things take longer than we would like to get moving, sometimes change can seem to happen at a glacial pace and whilst you are ready to try and run, others are finding their feet - or even digging in their heels!

In this talk, Stacy will go over some of the pitfalls that have happened to her, and the lessons that she has learned from them. Unfortunately, there are no magic solutions to make the problems go away, but hopefully, you can look at the mistakes she has made and go away to make your own new ones to learn from!

Onboarding junior developers

Hiring junior developers is a brilliant way to bulster your team without the high-cost of experienced developers.

Many developers dread hiring and working with junior developers, how do you know if they have the right skills? What should your expectations be?

Once you've found the right person, how do you make sure they are getting the support they need?

Maybe you're terrified of lots of hand-holding, or maybe you're excited because you get to pass on your experience.

Either way, it's in everyone's best interest that they succeed. This talk is perfect for both junior developers joining a new team and developers who work with (or will) junior developers.

The Making of a Great API

Everyone is writing APIs but what makes a great one?
I will take you on a tour of the most important features that you should think about when creating an API.
These ensure that your API plays well with HTTP and make your API a delight to maintain and work with.
Give your API a competitive edge by making it great and developers will want to work with it.

MySQL with🔔&🎵

Dive into MySQL to explore our Cargo Culting behaviours and the inner workings of MySQL that explain how the Cargo Culting formed and some useful tricks you may not know about.

• What happens when a table doesn't have a primary key?
• What does a sane primary key look like?
• What is a clustered index?
• How do indexes work?
• How should I design my indexes and how do I know if it is actually being used?
• What tools are there out there to make my life easier?

Tips for Tackling a Legacy Codebase

You’ve started a new job. As you dig deeper into the codebase, the WTFs per minute rate rapidly increases, and you’re left wondering... “Where do I start?!”.

In this talk, I’ll draw on my own experiences of joining several different teams to help upgrade their legacy codebase.

I’ll show you what approaches were tried, what worked, what didn’t work, and how things could’ve been done differently

You’ll come out of this talk with some ideas of how to tackle your own codebase and make it easier to refactor.

The absolute beginner's guide to Test-Driven Development

Automated testing; we all know we should do it, but not everybody knows how to do it well. It can be hard to get started with, and getting it wrong actually makes testing harder!

There are so many questions for beginners: - Should you aim for 100% code-coverage? - Should you test getter and setter methods? - Where does a unit test end and an integration test begin? - What is a mock (or a fake, or a spy, or a stub)? - Why bother with unit tests when you can cover everything E2E?

Having worked in several teams spanning the entire spectrum of awful-to-excellent testing, I want to show you some simple steps that will get you up to the realms of 'top-notch' straight away.

In this session we'll take a look at an example application and see how to develop new features which are tested appropriately. We'll introduce new concepts clearly and with examples, and we'll look at how to improve existing tests when an organisation gets it wrong.

No existing testing knowledge will be required to be able to understand this presentation, but you'll leave the room feeling like an expert.

Practical Tech Ethics or How to feel a little bit bad about everything for less money

If you're joining us live, in 2021, you may have noticed that the world around us isn't great right now.
Many of the bad things in the world today are linked to or facilitated by technology. As developers we have a great and terrible responsibility in these bleak times, we could work to make tech and the world better... or, we could at least refuse to make things worse?

In this talk, we'll look at how to define our own personal ethical values and set our own boundaries around these.
By setting our ethical boundaries in advance we can be better prepared to make decisions that reflect our own ethics when confronted by opportunities or challenges.