Talks

Getting unstuck in levelling up - Patterns for personal development

As a software engineer, you commit to a lifetime of learning. The IT world evolves so fast, and there is much unknown in the young field of software engineering.
How can you keep learning and growing? You might feel overwhelmed by all the available information around you. Or maybe you think you know it all? Or do you feel like an imposter at work, because there is so much you still don't know? These thoughts are not helpful if you want to continue learning and leveling up. It would help if you saw how far you have come in your learning journey and what steps you still need to take.
In this talk, I will show different ways of looking at your level of seniority and how those different views can be helpful. I'll also share some important values and practices for continuous learning. Additionally, I will discuss some behavioral patterns that you can use to level up your skills. I'll touch upon themes like the Growth Mindset, Learning from peers, Unlearning old views, Creating a knowledge portfolio, and Dealing with uncertainty. In this way, you can take control of your personal development. You can make your learning path more effective and not based on coincidence.

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Aligning Teams and Architecture for Fast Flow - A Use Case

Are you always in meetings with other teams to get things done? Are changes in your software system time-consuming? Is your software system getting too complex?
Delivering valuable software quickly and efficiently is often the goal of software projects. However, achieving fast flow can be challenging, especially as a software product grows in complexity and size. I had the same experience at a Dutch energy network operator.
Clearly, this was not where we wanted to be. We wanted to empower teams and create value continuously. To do this, we had to restructure the architecture and the team's responsibilities. In this talk, I will share how you can recognise that the current alignment of teams and architecture is problematic. After that, I will show the actions we took in our journey of improvement (and the reasoning behind them). Our approach has influences from Domain-Driven Design, Conway's Law, Team Topologies, and more.
This talk will be a combination of theory and practice. In that way, you can take advantage of our lessons learned!

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Writing cleaner code with Domain-Driven Design

I always thought that my code was fine. I took my time naming things, wrote small classes/methods, and tried to use other Clean Code practices. But after a job interview with a technical coach, I was pointed toward Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and some other design topics. I could learn a lot from it, said the technical coach. And I did! Since then, I started noticing how much parts of DDD could help with my day-to-day job. I will take you with me on my learning journey of Domain-Driven Design, and how it helped me improve my code. We will touch upon themes like Ubiquitous Language, Supple Design, Bounded Contexts, and more. You can expect a talk with a lot of code examples and practical advice that you can use the next day.

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Improving collaboration while working from home

When the pandemic hit us, everybody started working from home. Things disappeared, like quick alignments at the coffee machine and spontaneous discussions at the whiteboard. This can lead to a decreased shared understanding, quality, engagement and buy-in. It became even more obvious that explicit actions are needed and moments to collaborate need to be created. In this talk I will share what I have learned in the past 1,5 year. On how important it is to do it together. On what you can do to understand the problem better. On ways to design together. And on how you can improve working together while developing. After this talk you can look at your own team with new insights on how to improve collaboration and build great products together.

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