This is not a talk about speed coding, or writing thousands of lines of crappy code in a weekend. This is a talk for software craftsman who test drive clean code, but who also have a nagging feeling: “Man, I know I could be doing this faster.” We’re going to discuss everything from touch typing, to keyboard shortcuts, to faster pair programming techniques, to hardware, to build automation, to staying in the zone, to caffeine consumption, to ergonomics, to music and headphone selection, refactoring, language and framework selection, tech debt management, rapid prototyping, whiteboard design sessions, back of napkin mockups, guerilla tactics for getting in front of requirements and staying there, and what to do when you’re 30 lines down a stack trace and someone wants to tell you about something funny their kid did over the weekend.
As I enter my 18th year of developing software, several recurring trends and forces have become obvious to me. My day job as a technical lead affords me time in the evening to write articles and prepare talks around these trends and forces, all of which interest me greatly. To date these talks include “The ROI of Refactoring”, “Nothing Matters More Than Coding Fast”, and most recently “Writing Custom DSLs” - which was a sneaky way to speak about these trends and forces in the form of technical talk.
