Making Lemon-aid out of Lemons

Session Abstract

Making Lemon-aid out of Lemons. Lesson on how to transform bad code into good code.

As developers we understand the know between 'good, clean code' and 'dirty, sloppy code'. Sometimes we are the authors of the dirty, smell code and sometimes we inherit it. The fact is for any product to have a long vibrant life developers must strive on a daily basis to not continue to pile onto the smell code, we must work day in and day out to clean it up, even it it is one method or class at a time. In this talk we will take a look at many of the lessons I have learned during my career on how to deal the undesirables of the coding world. We will take a look at some specific examples along with debate various techniques you can use to address your stinky code problem.

Speaker

Derik Whittaker is a Software Architect who specializes in all things.Net. Derik has been building enterprise systems on top of the .Nettechnology stack for over 12 years and along the way has picked up athing or two about how to create killer systems. During his 12 year career Derik has worked in many different industries ranging fromMarking, Healthcare, Retail, Insurance, Automotive and OnlineEntertainment. Currently Derik is working for a Marking startup (3Birds Marking) in Chapel Hill North Carolina helping them build out abest of breed technology solution which will enable their users tocreate world class marking campaigns.

Derik believes that the jobof a developer is more than just turning syntax into working 1’s and0’s. He believes that our job is to produce a system which gets out ofthe users way and allows them to do their job better.
Derik hasbeen awarded the Microsoft MVP in C# for the past 4 years. Along withbeing an MVP he is also a member of the ASPInsiders group. Derik is acommunity leader, helping to organize events such as ChicagoCodeapalooza, Chicago Code Camp and the Raleigh Code Camp. He is also ablogger at Devlicio.us and runs the popular .Net screen casting siteDimecasts.net. Outside of his day job you can find Derik hanging outwith his beautiful wife Tiffany and his 2 awesome boys Brenadan andryan.