Devnology Podcast 025 - Kevlin Henney

In this episode we talk with Kevlin Henney, an independent
software development consultant and trainer from the United
Kingdom, well-known from one of his books '97 Things Every
Programmer Should Know'. In the interview we discuss a wide
variety of subjects in software development, like the agile
community, patterns, learning and languages.


Kevlin shares his thoughts on the software craftmanship movement
and states his opinion on the discussion whether our profession
is a form of engineering or not. In some parts of this discussion
we refer to the Hot-or-Not presentation that Kevlin gave the
night before the interview at Sioux, the Netherlands. You can
find the slides of this presentation here.


The interview was recorded at the hotel 'la Sonnerie' in Son
& Breugel. We would like to thank the hotel for their
hospitality by providing the chapel as a recording room for the
podcast.


Interview by @freekl en @arnetim
Audio post-production by @mendelt
Links for this podcast:

Kevlin (co) authored two books of the Pattern-Oriented
Software Architecture serie: volume 4 is a worked example of
patterns for distributed computing and the 5th volume is a book
on the concepts of patterns.

In the podcast Kevlin refers to a famous quote of Jason
Gorman: 'Software craftsmanship's not the "next big thing". It's
an attempt to articulate what the "thing" always was'.

Scrum can be seen as a 'Nomic' game, which is a game in which
changing the rules is one of the rules.

In a presentation called 'With Economy and Elegance -
Software Engineering reclaimed' (slides here) Kevlin explains
that Software Engineering is a form of engineering and a craft -
following his claim there are no contradictions.

Glenn Vandenburg explains what is wrong with the way Software
Engineering is taught at universities in the presentation called
'Real Software Engineering' (video here).

Software development is all about passion and fun. An example
of passion is the Tenet of Professionalism from Uncle Bob: 'Work
40 hours for your employer and another 20 hours improving
yourself'.

A great example of fun and playfulness in our industry is
'the Globe', a piece of Ruby software which rotates itself.

Another way to look at your code is with a tag cloud of all
words used in a piece of software. This idea was proposed by
Phillip Calçado.