Thinking of a bootcamp as "a series of long conversations" and other gems from teaching software craftsmanship.
Kenneth & Len are joined by Mike Hewitson for a talk on the developer bootcamps that Mike helps to facilitate at Investec.
Mike shares with us his journey from the army, to the railways, and how he got onto the financial services line. He has had several stops along the way in various insurers and supporting businesses, with some great stories from each stop along the way.
One of the moments Mike is most proud of is being part of a team that got asked by business to "slow down a bit", since they were delivering their software consistently quicker than business expected (or could manage). These were the days before "feature flags" were formalized, and nightly builds and deployments were hair raising.
Mike's current stop is at Investec, and this is where Mike helped institutionalize their culture of brown bag sessions into a more structured bootcamp format. These bootcamps run concurrently, with each group being about 10 developers, and they carry on for 8 months!
We unpack what the students do during their bootcamp, the support they receive from the leadership in the group, and get a few tips and tricks to get started with our own bootcamps.
Follow Mike online at:
Some of the resources mentioned during the show:
- Mike's talks on GitHub - https://github.com/mike-hewitson/my-talks
- Seven Languages in Seven Weeks - https://pragprog.com/book/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-weeks
- Seven Databases in Seven Weeks - https://pragprog.com/book/rwdata/seven-databases-in-seven-weeks
- Uncle Bob Martin - http://cleancoder.com
Refer to Mike's "my-talks" repository on GitHub for a treasure trove of information.
Picks
- Kenneth
- Len
- Mike
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