A collection of related ideas about software development picked up over the last couple of years of experience.

1. Loosely Coupled Thoughts Andrew Lenards Feb. 12, 2010

2. Andrew Lenards iPlant Collaborative S/W Eng on Core S/W team University of Arizona CS Grad, 2001 Reformed .NET developer Former consultant, instructor, & technical trainer Domain experience: Motor Vehicle Domain Phylogenetics / Bioinformatics (sort of)

3. Andrew Lenards - Activities Learning about: Requirements, User Stories, etc. S/W Design/Architecture, Patterns, SOA Molecular Biology, Phylogenetics, Phyloinformatics, Genetics, and Genomics Active in: Tucson Java Users Group Semi-active in: Tucson Startup Drinks Ubuntu Arizona Local Community / TFUG

5. What do you expectwhen you graduate?

9. The Myth of the Lone Developer

11. SRS -> * -> Code (rarely talking to anyone else, if so only other devs)

12. in-practice: lots of interaction w/ technical&non-technical people

15. Small team

16. Varying backgrounds

17. (brilliant co-workers)

18. Diverse skill-sets

19. What’d I get out of it?

24. “Lone” Developer, Meet your team:- PastYou-FutureMe

26. Systems grow & change in organic ways (related topic: Entropy)

27. Learned importance of unit testing

28. “Safety net for refactoring”

30. Ruthless refactoringw/ extreme confidence

31. Automation keepsyou & your team honest (Continuous Integration)

32. Broken Window Theory (Pragmatic Programmer)

33. Need an infectious attitude towardtesting…

34. Robust software is well-tested software

35. Good day for QA ==Bad day for Dev

36. "Testing is the engineering rigor of software development." -- Neal Ford

37. ExecutableDocumentation

38. Testing affects your design

39. TDD: Test-driven Development

40. TDD: Test-driven Design

41. Flexible design grows out of making code“testable”

42. “Legacy Code”:any source w/o unit tests

44. … of the community, by the community,for the community

45. Empowering the next generation of biologist

46. Why?

47. The world faces tough problems in the future

48. Fuel/Energy

49. Food

50. Water Supply

51. …

52. Cyberinfrastructure

53. “In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.”

54. Large systems designleads to diverse,interdisciplinary teams

55. With the direction of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics…

57. Software Development as aCollaborative Game

58. Soft skills are important

59. Speaking in tongues is not allowed

60. Working in pairs, not just forpair-programming ordebugging

61. Impromptu design discussions (they often include more than just technical folks)

63. Code for Science

64. I wasn’t always interested in science/biology

66. Confused looks are commonplace for me

67. YOU > me

68. Biology is an interesting domain

70. I know too much aboutAuto titling & international trucking fees

76. Going forward…

77. Test, test, test

78. If not test-first, test-very-soon-after

79. Help a FOSS project(best place to start: testing) [FOSS or F/OSS: Free or Open Source Software]

80. Practice communicating Join/start a FOSS project (as a group) Writing / Blog / Whatever Present@User Groups Toastmasters? UTA Program?

81. Design READ Books, Blogs, Magazines, PublicationsAND other people’s code Code Make mistakes and learn from them

82. Suggested Reading Pragmatic Programmer Andy Hunt & Dave Thomas 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know Productive Programmer Neal Ford Read “Uncle Bob” “The Humble Dialog Box” Michael Feathers

83. Learn a new programming languageevery year (or two)

84. Groovy, Python, Ruby,Perl, Icon, Scala, Lisp, Self, Scheme, Smalltalk, SML, …

85. Become familiar with popular FOSS projects…

86. What’s Inversion of Control?Don’t know? Learn more about Spring or Guice

87. Interested in biologyor computational biology?

88. Fun Foundational Materials The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology The Stuff of Life: the Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA Cartoon Guide to Genetics The Manga Guide to Statistics Cartoon Guide to Statistics

89. Still interested?

90. Really?!?

91. More Materials Lawrence Hunter Introduction to Molecular Biology for Computer Scientists http://compbio.uchsc.edu/Hunter/01-Hunter.pdf The Processes of Life: An Introduction to Molecular Biology A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology …

92. Miscellaneous Info Contact Info lenards@iplantcollaborative.org lenards@email.arizona.edu Slides Will be posted here: http://www.slideshare.net/lenards

93. Image Acknowledgements http://www.flickr.com/photos/lenards/3955049100/ “Mad Scientist Photo” of Andrew by Alex Yelich http://www.flickr.com/photos/thatgrumguy/402041540/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/freya_gefn/2777209147/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/pkmousie/2652404430/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/sklathill/479528238/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/lorelei-ranveig/2294093649/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/roadsidepictures/389828793/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/graylight/72935997/ http://www2.genome.arizona.edu/images/bio5bldg.jpg http://www.flickr.com/photos/7298460@N03/4335819270/ http://www.teachforamerica.org/assets/images/img/logo_tfa.gif

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