Tudor Gîrba
ArchConf
San Diego · April 4 - 7, 2016
CEO/software environmentalist at feenk.com
Tudor Gîrba (tudorgirba.com) is a software environmentalist and co-founder of feenk.com where he works with an amazing team on the Glamorous Toolkit, a novel IDE that reshapes the Development eXperience (gtoolkit.com).
He built all sorts of projects like the Moose platform for software and data analysis (moosetechnology.org), and he authored a couple of methods like humane assessment (humane-assessment.com). In 2014, he also won the prestigious Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for his research (aito.org). This was a surprising prize as he is the only recipient that was not a university professor, even if he does hold a PhD from the University of Bern from a previous life.
These days he likes to talk about moldable development. If you want to see how much he likes that, just ask him if moldable development can fundamentally change how we approach software development.
Presentations
Steering Agile Architecture
“Emerge your architecture” goes the agile mantra. That’s great. Developers get empowered and fluffy papers make room for real code structure. But, how do you ensure the cohesiveness of the result?
In this talk, we expose how architecture is an emergent property, how it is a commons, and we introduce an approach for how it can be steered.
Solving real problems without reading code
Too often, developers drill into the see of data related to a software system manually armed with only rudimentary techniques and tool support. This approach does not scale for understanding larger pieces and it should not perpetuate.
Software is not text. Software is data. Once you see it like that, you will want tools to deal with it.
Steering Agile Architecture
“Emerge your architecture” goes the agile mantra. That’s great. Developers get empowered and fluffy papers make room for real code structure. But, how do you ensure the cohesiveness of the result?
In this talk, we expose how architecture is an emergent property, how it is a commons, and we introduce an approach for how it can be steered.
Storytelling in a technical world
Our technical world is governed by facts. In this world Excel files and technical diagrams are everywhere, and too often this way of looking at the world makes us forget that the goal of our job is to produce value, not to fulfill specifications.
Feedback is the central source of agile value. The most effective way to obtain feedback from stakeholders is a demo. Good demos engage. They materialize your ideas and put energies in motion. They spark the imagination and uncover hidden assumptions. They make feedback flow.
But, if a demo is the means to value, shouldn’t preparing the demo be a significant concern? Should it not be part of the definition of done?
Software in pictures
Software has no shape. Just because we happen to type text when coding, it does not mean that text is the most natural way to represent software.
We are visual beings. As such we can benefit greatly from visual representations. We should embrace that possibility especially given that software systems are likely the most complicated creations that the human kind ever produced. Unfortunately, the current software engineering culture does not promote the use of such visualizations. And no, UML does not really count when we talk about software visualizations. As a joke goes, a picture tells a thousand words, and UML took it literally. There is a whole world of other possibilities out there and as architects we need to be aware of them.
In this talk, we provide a condensed, example-driven overview of various software visualizations starting from the very basics of what visualization is.