Productive Programmer: Automation and Canonicality
This session discusses how to use the Productive Programmer principles of automation and canonicality to become a more productive programmer. This session describes these principles, but the primary focus of this session is demonstration of these principles with real-world examples.
In The Productive Programmer, David Bock and I identify 5 principles of productivity: this talk goes into great detail on 2 of those principles. The session defines the principles and describes their use, but the primary focus of this talk is on real-world examples of how you can use these principles to make yourself a more productive programmer. Canonicality (the DRY principle from The Pragmatic Programmer) discourages repeating artifacts in projects. This talk shows effective ways to avoid this repetition. For example, I show how to reuse documentation via a Subversion hook that posts comments to a Wiki with an RSS feed. Automation refers to making the computer do more work for you. This talk includes tons of examples, all culled from real-world projects.
Session Topics:
- The Productive Programmer
- Automation defined
- Applying automation
- Scripting with…
- Win XP
- Bash
- Unix shell/cygwin
- Ruby
- Groovy
- Case Studies
- Canonicality defined
- Applying canonicality
- Hibernate and code generation
- Documentation Part 1
- Documentation Part 2
<cite>Note: This is a companion talk to my other talk, <b>Productive Programmer: Acceleration, Focus, and Indirection</b>, but each talk is completely independent of the other -- they are not "Part 1" and "Part 2".</cite>
About Neal Ford
Neal is Director, Software Architect, and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery.
Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis.
He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.