BeerConf: how we spent the summer

Hello! Four months ago we wrote about the first mini-conference in Chelyabinsk in the beer meetup format. Since then a lot of beer has passed under the bridge. We had three more meetings of BeerConf - one for each month of summer.
We really liked this format, the participants leave from the meetings with the satisfied, the places allocated for registration differ in a few hours.

June 8

At the second meeting, the format was tested with a complete lack of reports as such; two topics were set for discussion. Around them and there was a conversation.

Topics for the second meeting:

• General knowledge of the development team - pros, cons, best practice.
• Communication with customers or how to do without injury.

Literary recommendations left after the meeting

Robert Glass "Creative Programming 2.0"

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Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister "Waltzing with the Bears"


David Platt "Soft - sucks! And what to do with it?"

Quote of meeting

“The ideal customer must give money and leave”

4th of July

This meeting was different from everyone else. We had a guest Sergey Bosko - an engineer from a German IT company engaged in the development of medical software.
His two reports
- SCRUM and Agile technology: is it necessary?
- Automatic GUI tests: bruises and bumps
merged into one and turned into a fascinating two-hour story about how Scrum is implemented in their companies, what problems they face when organizing work and how they are solved, how they test software for medical equipment. In general, a lot of new and interesting participants of this meeting learned about the development.

August 18

Topics for the meeting:

• Why is the obvious solution not obvious? or communication problems in the development team.
• Documentation - formality or necessity?
• Effective work with legacy code
• What is not worth testing?
• What is the salary of a programmer in Chelyabinsk?

The meeting participants shared their views on the causes of communication problems in the team and how to solve these problems; discussed the need for documentation, the time and the best ways to write it; shared the practices of working with the inherited code and derived the definition of “inherited code”; marked the limits of applicability of unit tests; discussed the salary issue.

During the discussion of the need for documentation, the popular ASP.NET MVC Extensions project was cited as an example, the use of which is complicated by the lack of a detailed description. A few days after the conference, one of the authors of this project, Alexander Zaitsev (he is one of the founders of BeerConf), began a series of articles on MvcExtensions blog.hazzik.ru/post/19465323230
BeerConf stimulates! :)

Agreeing in many respects with Mail Fizers on his definition of the inherited code (“The inherited code is a code that is not covered by tests”), the meeting participants derived their own:

Inherited code - a code that is inconvenient to maintain, modify and extend.

Meeting book

Michael Fizers "Effective work with legacy code."

Tools praised by meeting participants

Decompilers ILSpy and dotPeek
A tool for generating pex tests

You can follow the BeerConf news on our website www.beerconf.ru and on twitter.com/beerconf

If you want to take part in the development of our site - welcome -
github repository - github.com/hazzik/beerconf-website (we need a design! :))

Some statistics

At summer meetings, BeerConf was drunk:

• 10 liters of beer
• 8 liters of tea
• 1 liter of coffee

On average, only 20% of participants order their beer.

If you pass Chelyabinsk, come, we will be happy :) Or organize BeerConf in your city!