Clean Your Desk and Define New Year Improvements

It is Christmas time. Clean your desk and the content of your workstation. Upgrade your tools and your development environment to the actual version.

It is time to add automated build pipelines, TDD, ATDD, and Docker to your toolbox. Embrace agile approaches.

Work focused and avoid overtime. Prioritize outcomes instead of outputs. Enjoy family life, practice sport, and pursue continuous training.

Clean Your Desk

Digitalize your Office

It is time to sell the last fax device in your office and plan to remove your big printer. Burn your paper documentation and discard your folders. Please store all information digitally and have an effective search application in your company. Use Wiki to publish company data and store knowledge for all collaborators.

Have a professional handset and a good camera for video conference.

Put all your documents on your company drive and index all this information. Finding relevant data by keyword searching is a huge gain of time. Another advantage is no more backup of workstations and notebooks. All mission critical information is always on the company's drives.

Socialize with your Team

Organize a real team room. Colocate all your team members, design on big whiteboards. And please use analog Scrum boards. You need big whiteboards, analog Scrum boards, meeting corners.

Restart your brown bag training program. A Friday beer event is always a welcome event.

Celebrate success after each major release of your products. Another gain is a lot of tensions just disappear when people talk around snacks and drink together a glass of wine.

Upgrade your Toolbox

As a Java developer it is time to use state of the industry tools and improve your daily work

1. Java 9 JDK - If you are still working with Java 7 or earlier you are a laggard 
1. Java 8 public support shall end middle of next year,
2. Java 10 shall be available next year. The early releases are already online. Download them and try the new features. The local variable declarations are a huge improvement,
3. You are a laggard and security danger if you are still using Java 6 or earlier,
2. Gradle
1. Build, deliver, and deploy your solution with one keystroke,
3. Continuous integration, delivery and deployment pipelines,
1. Never again configure manually a deployment by hand,
4. Test environments with Docker
1. Never say again "it is working on my machine",
5. Modern IDE such as IntelliJ IDEA
1. Very good Gradle support,
2. Very good JUnit 5 support,
3. Alt-Enter anywhere brings up context-sensitive options. Run a test, create a test, create subclass, convert to closure, generate missing test methods, remove explicit type, split into declaration and assignment, introduce local variable. The suggestions are limitless.,
4. Great Java 8 support, suggesting lambda notation where appropriate! 
5. Even displaying anonymous inner class usage (collapsed) as if it was written using a lambda expression,
6. Quality with PMD, FindBugs, SonarLint, or the build-in rules of IntelliJ
7. Banish Flash from your workstation

New Year Improvements

Sustainable Pace

Agile approaches state you should work at a sustainable pace, forty hours a week. Avoid working overtime during evenings or weekends.

Enjoy family time, practice sport, give back to the community.

Work with your team, ideally colocated in a team room. Face2Face exchanges and pair working - pair design, pair review, pair programming, pair checkin - are training on the job occasions.

Hone your Craftsmanship

Here some suggestions to hone your craftsmanship

• Practice coding dojos to improve your programming skills,
• Read good technical books, at least one book per quarter,
• Learn new shortcuts and plugins for your favorite IDE,
• Improve the agile, lean, Scrum, LeSS approaches in your department,
• Refactor daily code and practice clean-code,
• Become a master of Git,
• Increase self awareness and work on your soft skills, teamwork shall improve.

I wish you success, fulfillment, happiness and fun.