Extraordinary software + workshop

After a long period with no large events, we’re happy to announce a new event, with location and refreshments generously provided by Hoppinger (https://www.hoppinger.com). The event includes plenty of time to socialise with other 010DEV members and two short sessions: a mini-workshop and one presentation.

Programmers in all fields and with all levels of experience are welcome. We hope that beginners learn about an aspect of software development they didn’t know about, and that experienced software developers will learn from the beginners that there’s always something new to learn about.

Code of conduct (https://www.meetup.com/010DEV/pages/21033666/Code_of_conduct/)

Schedule

18:00 - Doors open (please don’t arrive before 18:00)
18:00-19:00 - Socialising and refreshments
19:00 - Presentation: Extraordinary software and how it’s built
19:40 - Socialising
20:00 - Mini-workshop: README Driven Development
20:40 - Socialising
21:00 - Finish

Extraordinary software: designing and building a teaching tool for university students

Teaching programming to college and university students is a challenge. On one hand, statistics tell us that Computer Science/Software Engineering higher education is hard to do, and that pass rates are quite low everywhere in the world. On the other hand, governments keep pressuring schools to churn out more and more new programmers to fill in the gaps in the industry. Unfortunately, increasing output comes at a cost: the quality of new graduates, especially from colleges, is decreasing, thereby moving the burden of preparing the new generation of the workforce on private companies.

In this talk, we present a tool, GrandeOmega, aimed at solving this problem by means of automation through web development, custom compilers and interpreters, and some more. GrandeOmega is a web application featuring an interactive, custom programming language system for teaching students how to program by interacting with code and a virtual memory. It is also an automated feedback system, which autonomously grades assignments.

GrandeOmega does not only feature the typical complexity of a web application: it also adds issues such as a very rich and reactive UI, the need for high performance, high computational loads, and replication of code on both the client and the server. In this talk, we outline the construction of such an application, and describe the resulting architecture and how it has enabled us to provide security, high performance, and scalability to serve large numbers of concurrent users.

Giuseppe Maggiore (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giuseppemaggiore/) is a programmer, converted to academia, then converted again to programming. He has worked as a consultant in Italy, holds a PhD in Computer Science, has been a teacher at various Dutch colleges (hogescholen), and is now CTO of Hoppinger. In his free time, he is setting up his own startup: GrandeOmega.

Mini-workshop: README-Driven Development

Documentation’s lack of popularity among programmers is at least partly due to time wasted on too much documentation, and producing too much docs the hard way. However, neglecting basic software documentation holds us and our projects back. This short mini-workshop introduces README Driven Development - a technique for Minimum Viable Documentation.

The interactive workshop format combines group discussion with a practical exercise: to develop an outline for the ideal project README with basic tools - pens and sticky notes. Attendees will learn a technique for writing and publishing effective documentation with less effort, and practice a long-term skill. This benefits all software development teams, because good system documentation is a universal software requirement.

Peter Hilton (http://hilton.org.uk) is a freelance software developer, writer, speaker, trainer, and amateur musician. His professional interests are business process management, web application development, functional design, agile software development and software documentation. Peter currently works as a programmer and technical writer for Signavio (https://www.signavio.com), remotely from Rotterdam where he has lived since January 2000, regularly presents at developer conferences, and delivers the occasional training course.