The document outlines essential tips and insights for professional programmers, covering topics such as knowing your tools, software engineering practices, business acumen, and personal development. It emphasizes the importance of staying current with technology, effective use of programming tools, understanding software deployment, and maintaining strong communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Overall, it advocates for ongoing learning and active involvement in one's career path to adapt to the rapidly changing tech landscape.

1. The Professional
Programmer
Some tips

2. What We Will Cover
● Know your tools
● Adjacent technologies
● Software Engineering and Architecture
● The Business
● Personal Development

3. Fluffiness vs Time

4. In Three Hours
● Lots to cover
● Moving pretty quickly
● High-level view
● Pointers to information
● Homework

5. Administrivia
● Let's keep this informal
● Dialogue > Monologue
● Share experiences
● Ask questions

6. Who Are You?

7. Who Are You?
● Hi, I'm Dave
● I'm very old
● I've been doing this for thirty years
● Freelance since 1995

8. Very Very Old
● When I was a school we did no computing
● First year of a physics degree
● No computing there either
● Dropped out

9. Very Very Old
● Sinclair Spectrum
● "I can do this"
● South Bank Polytechnic
● Computer Studies (1984-88)
● "Data Processing"

10. Course Syllabus
● VAX / VMS
● COBOL
● Assembler
● Prolog
● CODASYL Databases
● 5th Generation Computing

11. Useful Stuff
● C
● Unix
● SQL
● SGML

12. First Job
● C
● SQL
● Windows
● CASE Tool
● SSADM

13. Second Job
● C++
○ OO Programmng
● Network communication

14. Third Job (Disney)
● C
● Unix
● SQL
○ Sybase
● Ka-Ching!

15. Freelancing
● C / Unix / Sybase
● Perl
● City -> Dotcoms
● "New Media"
● BBC / Guardian

16. Lessons Learned
● 75% of my degree course was useless
● Out of date
● Industry in constant change
○ There are still jobs if you get left behind
● Self-taught
● Keep up to date

17. SGML?
● Standardised Generalised Markup Language
● Basis for XML
● Basis for HTML
● Funny how stuff comes around

18. Know Your Tools

19. Know Your Tools
● Three tools you use every day
● Editor
● Operating system
● Source code control

20. Editor
● A programmer's most important tool
● Get to know it well
● Pick one you like
● Not just vi vs emacs
● Lots of alternatives
● I like Atom

21. Programmer's Editor
● Use a real programmer's editor
● Get to know the features
● Take time to become an expert
● You will save time in the end

22. Editor Features
● Syntax highlighting
● Auto-complete
● Indentation
● Folding

23. IDE Features
● Deeper knowledge of languages
● Compile / run
● Debugging
● Source code control
● Multi-file projects

24. More Features
● Everything is configurable
● Everything is extensible
● Everything is programmable

25. Operating System
● Your operating system is where you live
● Get to know its features
● Design your working environment
● Automate things

26. Operating Systems
● What do you use your operating system for?
● Web browsing
● Reading email
● Social media
● Development?
○ Virtual machines
○ Containers

27. Configure Your OS
● Make it as comfortable as possible
● Window decoration
● Window behaviour
● Virtual desktops

28. Automate Common Tasks
● Automate anything the third time you need to do it
● Learn your OS's scripting mechanism
● Linux / Unix shell scripting
○ Aliases
○ Functions
● Powershell

29. SSH Connections
● You will need to connect to other systems
● Secure shell (ssh)
○ ssh-agent / ssh-add
○ ~/.ssh/config
○ Keepalive
○ Username
○ Agent forwarding
● Putty does all of this too

30. Source Code Control
● Why aren't you using git?
● Why aren't you using Github?
○ Microsoft
● Understand how your source code control works

31. Switch to Git
● Git has been the de-facto industry standard for ten years
● More powerful
● More flexible
● Harder to use
● Different paradigm
● "Optimistic concurrency"
● Good merge tools

32. Git Advantages
● Distributed model
○ Off-line access
● Branches are easy and quick
● Rebasing
○ Interactive rebasing
● "Fetch" vs "Pull"
● Safety net

33. Git in the Cloud
● Don't run your own Git infrastructure
● Other people are better than you at doing that
● Social coding
● Github
● Bitbucket

34. Adjacent
Technologies

35. Adjacent Technologies
● What other technologies do you use every day?
● Data storage
○ Databases
○ Data formats
○ XML
○ Caching
● Networking
○ HTTP

36. Adjacent Technologies
● Testing
○ Types of tests
○ Test automation
● Deployment
○ Jenkins
○ Docker
○ AWS

37. Data Storage
● How do you store your persistent data?
● Database
○ RDBMS
○ NoSQL
● Data files
○ JSON
○ YAML
○ XML

38. RDBMS
● Which database vendor do you use?
● Why did you choose MySQL?
● Would PostgreSQL be better?
● How does it scale?
● Replication vs Sharding
● How well do you know SQL?

39. RDBMS Features
● Which RDBMS features do you use?
● How vendor specific are they?
● Vendor-specific SQL extensions
● Referential integrity
● Stored procedures?
● Triggers?

40. RDBMS Usage
● How are your databases split?
● One database?
● One database per application?
● One database per service?
● Who owns the database?
● Who can change the schema?

41. Database Schemas
● How do you change database schemas?
● Can you easily tell which schema version is on a database?
● Do you use a database migration tool?
● What problems does that lead to?

42. NoSQL
● Which NoSQL database do you use?
● MongoDB, Redis, CouchDB, Memcached
● Do you understand the different types?
● Would you be better off with an RDBMS?

43. Data Files
● What formats are your data files?
● How are they processed?
● Are you using the best available tools to process them?

44. JSON
● Javascript Object Notation
● Popular data interchange format
● AJAX
● Decode to native data structures
● Encode from native data structures

45. JQ
● General purpose JSON utility
● Reformat JSON
● Extract data from JSON
● Powerful query language

46. XML
● Still popular
● For some reason
● Need to deal with it
● Find the right tools

47. XPath
● XML query language
● Extract data from XML documents
● Standard syntax

48. Networking
● What networking protocols do you use?
● How well do you know them?
● Seven layer model

49. HTTP
● Can you explain the HTTP request / response cycle?
● To what level of detail?
● What difference does HTTPS / SSL make?

50. HTTP Requests
● Can you name all of the HTTP request types?
● GET, POST, HEAD
● PUT, DELETE, PATCH
● OPTIONS, TRACE, CONNECT
● What are the differences?
● What are they used for?
● REST

51. Testing
● Do you write unit tests?
● Does your system have automated integration tests?
● How are your tests run?
● Automatically?

52. Unit Tests
● Never program without a safety net
● Does your code do what it is supposed to do?
● Will your code continue to do what it is supposed to do?
● Write unit tests
● Run those tests all the time

53. What is Unit Testing?
● Code that exercises an individual element (unit) of your code
● Provide known inputs
● Look for expected outputs
● “Bottom-up” testing

54. Test Driven Development
● Have you tried Test Driven Development?
● What did you like?
● What didn't you like?
● Will you try it again?

55. TDD Advantages
● Tests are a specification of your program
● If the tests pass, the program is finished
● Know when to finish

56. Behaviour Driven Development
● Let end users define tests in their language
● Simple domain-specific language
● Framework converts user tests to running code
● Cucumber

57. Test Automation
● What test automation frameworks do you know?
● What test automation frameworks do you use?
● Selenium

58. Test Coverage
● How good are your tests?
● How much of your code is used in your tests?
● Measure to improve

59. Deployment
● How is your system deployed?
● Where are the servers located?
● Do you care?

60. Deployment Environments
● What environments do you have?
● Development
● Integration
● Staging
● Production

61. Deployment Environments
● How is code moved from environment to environment?
● How similar are those environments?
● How are they kept in step?

62. Database Environments
● How are databases handled in development and testing environments?
● Full database?
● Smaller data sets?
● Anonymised data?

63. Deployment Options
● Real hardware
● Cloud servers
● Virtual machines
● Containers

64. Real Hardware
● Company owns or rents computers in a data centre
● Ops staff spend a lot of time in the data centre
● Commissioning new servers
● Decommissioning old servers
● No scalability

65. Cloud Servers
● Servers commissioned from a huge farm
● Commissioned / decommissioned from a dashboard
● Or with an API
● Never see the actual hardware
● Easily scalable

66. Virtual Machines
● Run one machine inside another
● Many virtual machines on one real server
● Easy to commission / decommission servers
● Easy scaling
○ Within limits of the hardware

67. Containers
● Docker
● Cut-down virtual machines
● Share a lot of the underlying OS
● Very quick to commission / decommission
● Layered architecture
● Store configuration in source code control

68. Cattle Not Pets
● Treat servers as cattle, not pets
● Make it easy to create new ones
● Do that a lot

69. Environment Configuration
● Keep your environments in step
● What software is installed?
● What versions of software is installed?
● Avoid "works on my machine"
● Puppet, Ansible, Chef

70. Jenkins
● Continuous integration
● Run tests on every commit
● Continuous deployment
● Make release available on every commit
● Quality gates
● Other, similar, products are available

71. Amazon Web Services
● Most popular cloud services providers
● Many services available
● Generic cloud servers (EC2)
● File storage (S3)
● Relational databases (RDS / Aurora)
● Caching (ElastiCache)
● Many, many more

72. Amazon Web Services

73. Other Cloud Providers
● Google Cloud Platform
● Microsoft Azure
● Oracle Cloud
● Rack Space
● Open Stack (self hosted)
● Etc...

74. Software
Engineering &
Architecture

75. Software Engineering & Architecture
● Software development lifecycle
● Programming paradigms
● Design patterns

76. Software Development Lifecycle
● Agile vs Waterfall
● Agile Manifesto
● Scrum vs Kanban vs Extreme Programming
● Know your tools
○ Jira
○ Code reviews

77. Agile Manifesto
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping
others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
● Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
● Working software over comprehensive documentation
● Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
● Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left
more.

78. Individuals and Interactions
● People are more important than processes
● Development teams know how to organise their work
● Business says what they need
● Development team works out how to achieve that
● Giving people more control and responsibility

79. Working Software
● Documentation is often out of date before it is finished
● Mismatch between business language and technical language
● Business often don't know what they want until they see the options
● Build prototypes and discuss alternatives

80. Customer Collaboration
● Don't just involve users when the project is specified
● Have user representatives as a part of the development team
● Instant response to developer questions
● More involvement leads to more business ownership of project

81. Responding to Change
● Requirements will change during the project lifetime
● Be flexible
● Plan for change

82. Programming Paradigms
● What paradigms does your system use?
● Procedural
● Object Oriented
● Functional
● Who made those choices?
● Why?

83. Procedural Programming
● Dumb variables
● Procedures, functions
● Hard to maintain
● Hard to scale

84. Object Oriented Programming
● Classes define both data (attributes) and behaviour (methods)
● Intelligent variables
● Encapsulation
● Subclassing
● Easy to maintain
● Easy to scale

85. Functional Programming
● Pure functions
○ Take inputs, return values
○ No global variables
● Immutable variables
● Prefer recursion to loops
● Easier to maintain
● Good for asynchronous programming

86. Design Patterns
● "Gang of Four" book
● "Monolithic" architecture
● Service Oriented Architecture
● Microservices

87. The Power of Names
● Design patterns weren't new or exciting
● Naming them was
● Catalogue of known techniques
● Easier to discuss
● Easier to share

88. The Business

89. The Business
● What does your company do?
● What does success look like?
● How do they measure success?
● How do you contribute to that success?

90. What Does Your Company Do?
● What service does your company provide?
● Why do customers choose your company?
● What is the USP?

91. Making Money
● What is your company's business plan?
● Where does the money come from?
● Are there multiple sources of income?
● How secure is that income?
● How much profit does the company make?
● How does that compare to your salary?

92. Competitive Marketplace
● Who are your biggest competitors?
● How are you ranked?
● Why do customers choose your company?
● Why do customers choose your competitors?
● What is your company doing to change the balance?

93. Mergers & Acquisitions
● Has your company bought any other companies?
● Might your company buy any other companies?
● What companies might it buy?
● Who owns your company?
● Might they sell it?

94. Stocks & Shares
● Is the company private or public?
● Can you buy shares?
● Is there an employee share scheme?
● What are the shares worth?
● Can you get share options?

95. Personal
Development

96. Personal Development
● Where do you want to be in five (or two, or ten) years?
● How you you get there?
● Do you have a plan?

97. Career Structure
● What is the hierarchy like?
● Where are you currently?
● Where do you want to be?
● How do you get there?
● Annual reviews

98. Management vs Technical
● Do you want to manage people?
● Team leader
● Development manager
● Help others build a career
● Less time coding
● More politics

99. Management vs Technical
● Do you want to manage systems?
● Technical lead
● Technical architect
● Steer the technical direction of the project
● Less time coding
● More meetings

100. Job Titles
● Job titles in our industry mean very little
● Each company is different
● How senior is a senior developer?
● Flat structures
● Often used as an incentive
● Job spec (and package) is more important

101. Setting Targets
● What do you need to do to get to the next level?
● Specific targets
● "Take responsibility for this subsystem"
● "Lead a project that is estimated to take four weeks"
● Identify training requirements
● Don't forget "soft" training

102. Internal Marketing
● Does the CTO know who you are?
● Does the CEO know who you are?
● Reply to email chains
● Give presentations at company meetings
● Speak to people in the kitchen
● Socialise

103. External Marketing
● How well-know are you outside of your company?
● Write a blog
● Answer questions on forums
● Speak about your work

104. Blogging
● Blog about your work
○ Check first
○ Company tech blog
● Blog about your personal projects
● Use your blog posts to answer questions on forums
● Comment on well-known blogs
● Add your blog to aggregators

105. Blogging Practicalities
● Wordpress
○ Hosted (wordpress.com)
○ Self-hosted (wordpress.org)
● Medium
○ Publications
● Github Pages
● Custom domain

106. Public Speaking
● Give talks about your projects
● Public speaking isn't as hard as you might think
● Start with a lightning talk

107. Some Public Speaking Secrets
● Some people aren't good at public speaking
● Or, at least, they don't make an effort to improve
● Not hard to be good at it
● Very easy to be better than average
● Watch videos to improve

108. TED
● Excellent examples of talks
● Interesting subject matter
● Engaging speakers
● Well-designed slides
● Something to aim at

109. Public Speaking Practicalities
● Find somewhere to speak
● Meet-up groups
● Local user groups
● Conferences

110. Conclusions

111. Conclusions
● Good developers are in short supply
● And that isn't going to change in our lifetimes
● Plenty of opportunity to make a difference
● Plenty of opportunity to do well
● Know your industry
● Know your tools
● Keep up to date

112. The Professional
Programmer
Dave Cross
@davorg
dave@perlhacks.com