CSC 322.01, Class 33: Guest Lecture

Overview

• Preliminaries
  • Notes and news
  • Upcoming work
  • Good things to do
  • Friday PSA
  • Questions
• Guest speaker: From Darby and English to the Twin Cities, Medicine, and Software Design
• Guest speaker: From Story to Software
• Work time

Preliminaries

News / Etc.

• Mentor sessions next week Tue 8-9 and Thu 7-9.
• Reminder that Pair Programming is preferred practice.

Upcoming work

• Reports today!
• Readings for Sunday (updated):
  • Chapter 4 of Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby
  • Chapter 5 of Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby
• Mid-sprint demos and discussions Monday.
  • New format.

Good things to do (Academic/Artistic)

• Sexual Respect Awareness Month.
• HackGC event this weekend.
• Way too many cool movies and talks.
• Rap concert tonight. (Opening act is a Grinnell alum.)
• The Cypher Paradigm: Closing Cypher, Tuesday, 8:30 p.m., ARH 120.
• Squire Lecture in Physics, Tuesday at 11:45: STEM Equality and Inclusion, a Female Astronomer’s View. Noyce 1023.

Good things to do (Peer)

• WGMC 6pm on Thursdays.

Good things to do (Misc)

• ISO Cultural Evening Saturday night at 7pm in Harris
• Escape Room, 7-9pm Monday, Gates
• DAG field day.
• Track and Field Dick Young Invitational April 21.
• Water polo!
• Men’s Tennis, April 21 & 22.

Friday PSA

• Choices related to the date are not amusing.
• Moderation in all things, even coding.

Questions

From Darby and English to the Twin Cities, Medicine, and Software Design

• In HS, got to play with teletype connected to mainframe elsewhere.
• Learned BASIC on HP-2000.
• Macalester: Fortran, APL, Plotter on HP 1130.
• Went to Grinnell.
• Programming in Fortran was useful at Grinnell.
• Rewrote Charlie Duke’s code in a few weeks to use overlays.
• Then got way too many other jobs.
• Thought he’d be a Physics/Math major.
• Took History of British Literature with Peter Connolly. Connolly was a former Math major who had a very analytical approach to literature. He fell in love with it.
• Graduated in 1982. Worst recession in a long time. Even worse than that of 2008 or so.
• Gene Hermann recruited him back here to work for ITS.
• Worked too hard, burned out.
• Applied to graduate schools. Got Ph.D. in Renaissance Lit.
  • Did a little programming on the side for money.
• Then to Ohio State. Ended up leading Computers and Composition group. Rekindled love of computing.
• Didn’t get tenure. Didn’t accept option to re-apply.
• Needed to re-tool from C+Unix to Java+…. Took a few courses; but it turns out once you’re good enough at something, re-training isn’t too bad.
• Got a job programming at Cambridge Incubator. A great environment. Creative people. Lots of people with other training.
• After one of his courses, he got invited to be VP of Engineering. Put him on the path of Engineering Leadership.
• Wife’s career took them to the Twin Cities.
• Luckiest thing: Being able to select the people he worked with.

What was it like to learn programming?

• Code reading is a neglected skill.
  • Entering programs from books.
  • Manipulating them to do other things.
  • Note that you have access to lots of code to read: The source to Rails and Ruby, so much more.
• Code has a tight dopamine cycle.
• Read a lot of books,
  • K&R “with microscopic attention to detail”.
  • Wirth’s “Algorithms plus
  • Plauger’s “Software Tools”

Guest speaker: From Story to Software (Story Lifecycle)

• Primary project, something called “Chirp”. A medical records system designed for his health care system.
• Health Care Coach has part of the knowledge.
• Health record put on screen for doctor, patient, and hcc to discuss.
  • For example, for someone who refers to Diabetes as Sugar Disease, one might describe it as that and then tie it to Diabetes.
• Small team helps lead to faster development
  • See “The Mythical Man Month”
• They use a model.
• Simple Trello board
  • To Do, Doing, Read for Acceptance, Acceptance, Done.
  • He does accepting. Moving to rollout is Done
• Generally limit one thing per engineer at a time.
  • Humans can’t multitask well.
• Example: Listening to a customer/stakeholder working through one of their activities and explaining why it’s a pain. More “here’s the problem” rather than just “this is what I want”.
• Focus “Jobs to be done”. What do they want to be done.
  • Ulwock What Customers Want
• Decided to look at it as a supply problem. (Supply is user stories.)
• Has acceptance criteria (AC)
• UX person may just add some mockups.
• Engineers take the top card of the list.
  • Even if you don’t know it!
  • In that case, you need to find someone to pair with at the beginning.
• Engineer eventually sends pull request.
• And announces it on Slack Channell (or equivalent)
• Review of begins with specs. They use Ember. RSpec is good.
• The discussion in the review is useful.
• Importance of respect in doing this.
• Release note written.
• Note: Features can be done but still need to be done for individual users.
• Compliance setting helps encourage them to do this, but they’d probably do so anyway.
• “Testing is an art that you have to do regularly to be an effective engineer.”

Q&A

Is this available for others?

• No.

How do you deal with the context switch when you’re at the review step?

• It happens.

Why don’t you like specialization?

• We don’t like handoffs.

Are there other things that Sam should do

• More end-of-scrum retrospectives.

Work time