Caught a couple of nice links from @unclebobmartin via twitter this morning that I thought were worth sharing. The first one is a very nice summary of the Software Craftsmanship conference that took place last week in London. From reading this review, it sounds like there were a lot of very interesting and interactive sessions. The author,Kerry Buckley, shows off his own mind-map of software development practices which I think is pretty cool (using Graphviz and including such things as TATFT,TDD, and YAGNI. I’d be interested in seeing how others’ graphs differed and what a composite graph might have looked like. I’m also intrigued by the ideas of katas for self-improvement as a developer (described in another session). I’m a practicingisshin-ryukarate-ka, and one of the reasons I chose martial arts is because of the greater degree of knowledge, discipline, and self-improvement that it provides in comparison to, say, walking on a treadmill. There’s some interesting discussion of katas as a means to gather constructive criticism from peers, which I also think is valuable.

There’s a lot more interesting stuff in the post (read it), and I hope soon there will be more of these conferences, especially in the US (there is an active Software Craftsmanship group in Chicago).

Another Uncle Bob link is a review of his book, Clean Code, which I expect will be waiting for me when I return home from the MVP summit later this week. I’ll be sure to post my own review once I’ve had a chance to read it. (oh, and if you haven’t read Uncle Bob’s articles, I highly recommend them, in addition to the 10 papers every developer should read that Michael Feathers recently posted, which I’m still working through).