(FREE TALK) Software Craftsmanship UK Meetup: Designer Code January 6, 2011

As programmers it’s easy for us to ignore the more aesthetic elements of the work we do and focus purely on the code. We can often fall into the trap of letting others worry about how well our user interfaces work for the end users, rather than putting the time into thinking about how to design the user experience.

This session will focus on the fact that coding cleanly is actually an exercise in good User Experience, and that the skills we acquire whilst getting better at coding well are directly applicable to thinking about our end users use our systems.

As part of the session we will take a piece of obfuscated code with a very bad user experience. Guided by tests, we will refactor the code so that it’s as good an experience as possible for others to use.
Depending on numbers we will either run the practical elements of the session in a Randori style (everyone takes turns to code with their actions being projected) or as a competition: “who can produce the cleanest most readable code in the time available?” We will then look at lessons learnt from the exercise and how we can apply them to our end customers.

Session requirements (technical): You will need a basic working knowledge of ruby to participate in the refactoring exercise. If you have it available, please bring a laptop with ruby and rspec installed to run the code.

Sign up here: http://skillsmatter.com/event/java-jee/designer-code/zx-1270

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=137079953011763

Official Website: http://skillsmatter.com/event/java-jee/designer-code/zx-1270