Video: Padawan to Jedi – A Developer Jump-Start (my presentation at Austin Code Camp 2011)

Here is the video of my “Padawan to Jedi – A Developer Jump-Start” presentation I gave last week at the Austin Code Camp 2011. It touches on all the principles, patterns, practices, and such that I have learned in my many years being a developer. I designed the Padawan2Jedi talk to present knowledge in a two-fold manner:

1. To cover a very wide range of topics so that newcomers to the craft can gain an understanding of the full scope of modern software development practices. As such, there is not time to cover any one topic in very much detail
2. To provide links to detailed information on each topic so that anyone could dig in deeper to learn about anything presented that they wanted to begin putting into practice

This second manner of presenting information required a different medium. If I wanted people to have access to all these links, I knew that I couldn’t just put links on my slides…no one would want to write them all down. And after all, we are technologists…I had to use something suitable to the audience, so I thought Twitter would be a more suitable way to convey the links during my presentation. I did some searching and found a script that would send tweets from the presenter notes as you moved through the slides of an Apple Keynote presentation. The script is called Keynote Tweet 2.

So as I went through the slides, the resources were tweet(ed?) out over the #Padawan2Jedi hashtag. I really wanted them to walk away with all the links to the resources, and they did. The talk lasted 2 hours, and my screencast recording software (Camtasia) died halfway through, so if you notice a change in the audio, partway through, that is why. I also had to re-record the last half of the video of the slides, so if they aren’t perfectly in sync with the talk, that is why. (Its amazing how hard it is to anticipate when to change the slide…even when you were the one talking…)

• Padawan 2 Jedi Slides (Apple Keynote File) (The keynote file is 30MB because of all the Star Wars images.)
• Padawan 2 Jedi Slides (PDF)

Here is the abstract that I submitted for the talk:

Are you wanting to become a better developer, but don’t know where to start? Do the terms TDD, BDD, CI, SOLID, etc. seem foreign to you? This two part presentation will cover many of the modern development practices today that every developer should know. Learn about object oriented design principles, design patterns, testing (mocking, TDD, BDD), source control, continuous integration, agile practices, plus many useful tools and techniques. That’s a lot to cover, so while some topics will be discussed in-depth, others will be touched on lightly, with resources on where to get more information. The purpose of the presentation is to give a broad overview of how modern developers work and the tools they use to be efficient and productive and provide resources so that any aspiring developer can get on the fast-track to becoming better at their craft.