Unconference

Unconference day

A few weeks ago I was at a learning event arranged by Måns Sandström from Adaptiv together with Ola Ellnestam from Agical. It was called "Learning the learned". The people who arranged it had noticed that senior developers have difficulty finding worthwhile learning events. Courses are often very expensive and is often on such a basic level that any of the participants could have been in charge of the course themselves if given a day to prepare. Conference presentations, while inspiring, are often too short to go into any greater depth, and have to take into consideration that many in the audience may be juniors.

So the solution was to have the senior developers teach each others. The format was inspired by the "unconference" or "Open Spaces" concepts that you may have seen from conferences. In other words, instead of having one person in charge and many passive listeners, people are encouraged to self organize in groups around topics that interest them and then discuss, pair program, draw on whiteboards, or whatever they can come up with. Måns and Ola invited a number of people who they thought had valuable things to contribute to such a day. After a few unfortunate last minute cancellations we were 7 participants at the start of the day.

At the beginning of the day, each participant wrote down a short sentence on a sticky note for every topic he* found interesting and wanted to explore. We put the notes up on a whiteboard in turn and explained a little more in depth what each topic was about. We then wrote our names on every note that sounded interesting. Then we picked two notes with the highest number of votes and formed two groups. One group wanted to explore "Testing frameworks for functional languages", and my group wanted to discuss "Unit testing beyond 'assertEquals'". We discussed how it feels like there are often two sources of non-DRY code when writing tests in Java - test data setup, and secondly the assertion lines themselves (so yes, pretty much all of it, unfortunately). For test data setup we quickly discussed Object Mother and Data Builder patterns, and mock frameworks like Mockito. For the assertions parts, I learned for the first time about Matchers (hamcrest to be specific) and the assertThat method. The combination of the two creates very readable error messages and tests that can be quickly and cleanly written by combining predicating matchers. At the end of the session we did a quick recap of what we had learned for the other group. As people came up with new topic ideas, new sticky notes went up on the board during the day.

Second and third sessions I spent doing the first few exercises of the excellent 15 exercises to know a programming language using Clojure, together with Ola Ellnestam and Peter Hultgren who has since founded the Stockholm Clojure User Group. At the final session of the day people were pretty mentally exhausted, and instead of programming we all did a session together where we discussed "Books every developer should read" - programming related and not.

In between sessions Ola was in charge of short exercises that were either medition and focusing exercises, or little games designed to make the participants get to know each other better. These were great fun, and helped greately to keep concentration up.

For me this was a fantastic day. I learned much more than I have at the conferences I usually attend, plus I got to know new interesting people. Before going I was a bit nervous - the topics I had come up with felt "too easy" - stuff a senior programmer should already know. But considering how expansive our field is (and growing every day), no one can be an expert at everything, so this was really something I needn't have worried about (and neither should you, if you decide to go to something similar).

I think that if I could go to something like this once a month, it would accelerate my learning and my career enormously. Hopefully this will become a regular event, the participants all agreed we should try to do it at least once every couple of months. And there is nothing stopping you from arranging a similar event, the concept is not trademarked or anything (though the people who arranged this day say mentioning them as a source of inspiration is appreciated).



* Only guys present this time unfortunately. Sad that gender imbalance in our sector is actually growing! But that is a topic for another post...