BeerConf: how we spent the summer

Hello! Four months ago, we wrote about the first mini-conference in Chelyabinsk in beer meetup format. Since then, a lot of beer has flowed away. We held three more BeerConf meetings - one for each month of the summer.
We really liked this format, participants leave meetings happy, the places allocated for registration diverge in a few hours.

June 8

At the second meeting, a format was tested with a complete absence of reports as such, two topics for discussion were asked. A conversation was going on around them.

Topics for the second meeting:

• The general knowledge base of the development team is the pros, cons, best practice.
• Communication with clients or how to do without injuries.

Literary recommendations left after the meeting

Robert Glass “Creative Programming 2.0” Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister “Waltzing with the Bears” David Platt “Soft Sucks!” And what to do with it?"

Meeting quote

“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 presentations
are SCRUM and Agile technologies: is it necessary?
- Automatic GUI tests: bruises and bumps
merged into one and turned into a fascinating two-hour story about how Scrum implements in their company, what problems they encounter when organizing work and how they solve them, how they test software for medical equipment. In general, the participants in this meeting learned a lot about the development.

August 18

Meeting topics:

• 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, time and best ways to write it; shared legacy code practices and developed a definition of “legacy 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 also one of the founders of BeerConf) - began a series of articles about MvcExtensions blog.hazzik.ru/post/19465323230
BeerConf stimulates! :)

Agreeing in many respects with Michael Feathers in his definition of the inherited code (“Inherited code is a code that is not covered by tests”), the participants of the meeting came up with their own:

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

Meeting book

Michael Fizers "Effective work with the inherited code."

Tools praised by meeting participants

Decompilers ILSpy and dotPeek
Tool for generating Pex tests You

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

If you want to take part in the development of our website - welcome -
repository on github - 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 a beer.

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