2016 SCNA

Links

• Revisit the presentations

Keynote Presentation

Michael Feathers

• Consider benefits and tradeoffs

  • Readability\/familiarity vs using new language constructs

    • loops vs reject\/map

• Conflict between learning and delivering value

  • Importance of trying out things, sketching out solutions

    • Key to software crafting

  • Still being mindful of producing value\/solutions

• Appreciate and empathize with what we create

• Over-engineering tension

  • Sometimes we must over-engineer to recognize over-engineering

Learn Better Together (Learning as a Team)

Audrey Troutt

• She claims 20-70% of development time spent on learning

• Ashley Johnson High Performing Virtual Team

• Types of learning as a team

  • Classroom - "Protected Time"

    • "Junior" learning

      • Challenging to adopt to "real-world" environment

• Coaching through iteration and reflection

• Learning as you go

  • Brown bag

    • Not recommended because individuals who are forced to go won't really learn

• Book an expert and organize a hackathon

  • When a challenge presented itself, the group would stop and the expert would talk about it

  • Has the benefits of "protected time" learning

• Collaborate learning works best with groups of 3-4 people with mixed abilities

• Spike

  • Spike review is key for sharing knowledge at the conclusion

• Pair exchange program

  • Take a day to work as a pair in different programs

  • Host gains a new pair of eyes on a problem already being worked

  • Visitor gains new perspective and viewpoint of an unfamiliar project

  • Learning time is still protected

• Teaching solidifies learning

• Takeaways

  • Clarify goals

  • Apply immediately

  • Protect learning time

  • Include everyone

    • Learning is social

  • Iterate and reflect

Reviving a Community with Code

Jonathan Graham & Amanda Laucher

• Mined Minds

• [e-mail]

Panel Discussion

Uncle Bob, Michael Feathers, Amanda Laucher & Ray Hightower

• Choose software paradigm to fit the problem

  • Waterfall may be good for projects with long lead times

• Object oriented -> functional -> collections

  • APL?

• Parallelism vs server-less (AWS)

• Things to revisit that the software community has abandoned

  • Study some of the roots, such as practicing with assembly code

• The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Language

• zip is similar to a deginerate transpose

• Pre-testing vs post-testing

  • TDD is dead?

Consequences of an Insightful Algorithm

Carina Zona

• How do we mitigate unintended consequences of using data provided by users?

• Predictive analysis

• Deep learning

  • Algorithms for fast, trainable, artifical neural networks

    • Input

    • Execution

    • Output

• Machine learning fail

  • Target

    • 2nd trimester is a key for advertising because customer brand loyalty is up-for-grabs for not just the woman, but her child

      • Turns out the an algorithm determined that an increased purchase of moisturizer indicates a likelihood that a woman is pregnant

    • Invasion of privacy?

  • Shutterfly

    • False positives (such as a likelihood of a birth) can cause unintended consequences, such as a mailer about newborn photos may be hurtful to someone who miscarried

  • Fitbit

    • Treated all data as equal and public

      • In the early days it had an activity for sexual activity

  • Uber

    • Tracks things such as one-night stands

• Consder the failure modes, the edges cases

• Flipping the paradigm

  • Consider decisions' potential impacts

  • Evaluate potential impacts

  • Be honest

  • Be trustworthy

  • Build in recourse

    • Ability for user to correct an bad conclusion

  • Fully disclose limitations

    • Call attention to signs of risk of harm

  • Be visionary about potential biases

  • Anticipate divese ways to screw up

  • Audit outcomes constantly

  • Crowdsource all the time

  • Cultivate informed consent

  • Commit to data transparency

  • Commit to algorithmic transparency

Exploring Parallelism with Parallella and Raspberry Pi

Ray Hightower

• RayHightower.com

• Concurrency is not Parallelism

  • Currency: At least two threads are making progress

    • i.e. time partitioning

  • Parallelism: At least two threads are executing simultaneously

• "Mapping complicated algorithms to massively parallel harward architectures is considered a ..."

• How to BYOC

• Useful software

  • LanScan Pro

  • TightVNC

• Open MPI

• MPICH

• mpi4py

• ssh keygen

• What can we do with it?

  • hadoop

    • MapReduce

• Ventusky

  • Javascript implementation of weather forecasting

• Developments

  • Epiphany building a 32x32 core chip

  • RISC-V is a instruction set that has parallelism built-in

How to Scratch and Itch (in 200 Repos or Less)

Justin Searls

• Co-founded TestDouble

• Recognize when it's ok to make a mess

• Popularity without purpose is toxic

• Google "TDD failure"

• fine_ants

• not winning != not worthwhile

• Criticism is easier than contributing

• GPL

• emoruby

Code Retreat

4 Rules of Simple Design (Kent Beck)

• Tests Pass

• Expresses Intent

• No Duplication

• Short

Conway's Game of Life

Game Basics

• A cell can either be alive or dead

• A cell's state change is dictated by:

  • Any live cell with <2 live neighbors dies of under-population

  • Any live cell with 2 OR 3 live neighbors lives on

  • Any live cell with >3 live neighbors dies of over population

  • Any dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbors comes alive

Problem Set 1

• No constraints

• Ray Joseph De Castro

  • https://github.com/raydecastro/node-es6-tdd

Problem Set 2

• No primatives across method boundaries

• Input and output types must be defined by us

Problem Set 3

• No talking

• Ian

  • github: @ianDCarrol

  • [e-mail]

• Python test suite

  • nose

    • import nose.util

    • Writing tests with nose

Problem Set 4

• Programming like it's 1965

  • Can only test the code twice:

    • At the 30 minute mark

    • At the end