From our third meetup which was in October. So many people! It’s just awesome!

The last /dev/night was a huge success! We had over 20 people at our last event in October! That was a whopping 330% increase compared to our last event!

How the event went down

At our second event in August, we changed our plans. We wanted to focus on fundamental things and it seems to appeal to a wider audience, which is awesome!

@sd_alt did an awesome presentation about TDD. He introduced us to different concepts of TDD. Then he gave us some arguments to convince others why we should use TDD. Followed by a step by step guide on how to actually write unit tests.

Here are two things I want to highlight from the talk:

Later Equals Never.

– Robert Greiner

The test pyramide.

After the talk, we were ready for the challenge. This time we did the “Pig Latin Kata”. If you haven’t done it already, you should try it out! It’s a lot of fun!

Learnings

We learned that our strategy to first focus on the simpler topics was correct. The second thing we learned is that fewer people than we thought were familiar with TDD. But since TDD is an integral part of our challenges we thought about how we can improve the situation. We came to the conclusion that we offer a “TDD first aid”-service half an hour before the event starts. This should provide those who need with the necessary knowledge.

Also, we want to start a repository which contains starting points for the different languages to get into TDD. We’ll see how that will go, but it could be quite useful.

But what I want to say is: Thank you! Thank you @sd_alt for an awesome talk! Thank all you who were there! It just was awesome!

What’s new

We also launched some new stuff:

  • dev-night.io
  • Meetup Page
    • We started a MeetUp-Page.
    • We will use this site to communicate future events.
    • It might also help us to get new people interested in our meetup.
  • Twitter Account
    • We are now also on Twitter which helps us to communicate more.
  • Telegram Group
    • We’ll use this to discuss future topics.
  • We now also post pictures of past events on our homepage. Check it out! ;)

What’s up next

Our next event will focus on all the things which we couldn’t fit in at the last event. @stesie will introduce us to the red-green-cycle, baby-steps, arrange-act-assert and mocking by example. So you could call it a “TDD++” session. The topics we’ll cover will clarify what we already learned and it might also sharpen our senses to become better developers.

Clean code is not written by following a set of rules. You don’t become a software craftsman by learning a list of heuristics. Professionalism and craftsmanship come from values that drive disciplines. Robert C. Martin

TL;DR

Don’t say you’ll write your tests later. Do it now. It benefits you, your boss and your costumers.