Houston Tech Fest is upon us! It happens this weekend, Saturday the 28th, and I have a surprise for you: I’ll also be doing my “Software Development is a Joke!” session there. Check out the conference’s agenda to see where and what time my sessions are going to be, and make sure to stop by and say hi. 

Want to build software? Get your act together first!

Software developers are supposed to create applications that make people’s life easier, automating tedious tasks, encouraging users to get their work done, organizing complex workflows into digestible information and actions, helping them separate the most important information from the least important. But still, most developers forget to automate their own boring tasks. We forget to organize our information. We sometimes use tools that do not help us get our work done.

So how can we build software that fits our client needs, if we don’t understand those needs ourselves?

This session is NOT about software development; this session is about things we can do and tools we can use to organize ourselves, so we can free up our minds to more important things. Tools covered in this session include (but not limited to) Evernote, application launchers, screen capture tools, tablets, smartphones, etc.

Software Development is a Joke!

Several of my technical presentations introduce some kind of humor, but sometimes people end up learning the joke and not the concept. So I decided to do a humor presentation based on software development, introduce some technical stuff, and see what I get!

After so many years writing software, I can’t help but laugh at so many (good and bad!) experiences myself and other developers have had. Not to mention things that just can’t make sense to normal people: how can this ?[A-Z0–9._%+-]+@[A-Z0–9.-]+.[A-Z]{2,4}$ be called a “regular” expression? (If you know by heart what that expression means, you are probably the kind of people who will try to explain to me why zero-based arrays are kinda cool… please, just don’t!).

F-bombs may be dropped, but let’s be honest, you drop them yourself when it’s 5pm on Friday and that code insists not to work, don’t you?