Are Developer Productivity and Developer Joy opposites?

A few glasses of fizzy were consumed during the JetBrains party at Devoxx Belgium last year:

Holly: You do presentations about productivity, and about developer happiness, and I do presentations about developer joy. We should do a presentation together!

Me: Yes! What a fantastic idea! Two titans of the London Java Community co-presenting on a topic that excites us both!

This is the story of how that went

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What do you mean, Backwards Compatibility? (YOW 2013)

YOW recorded me, yet again, talking about the adventure that is the design of the new Java Driver for MongoDB. This is the same talk I gave at GeeCON and DevoxxUK, with some updates based on our Journey So Far. In it, I cover the architecture of the new driver and some of our current thoughts around where we want the API to go.

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First presentation at the Virtual JUG!

Yesterday I had the privilege of presenting the very first session for vJUG, a new virtual Java User Group that allows us to span geographies when sharing talks and stories. I'm really interested in the vJUG idea, especially now I'm not in London - if we can find good ways to share knowledge without having to travel, that will help us reach people who don't normally go to conferences or don't have a local user group to go to. Not to mention cutting travel costs and saving the environment.

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Life on both sides of the interview table

Trisha and Dan North presenting

InfoQ has posted the video of Dan North and I opining on the subject of hiring. Most of the talk is spent on how to be a good interviewer, and touches on how to market your company to prospective hires. We spend less time on how to do well as an interviewee, but in theory if you know what's going through the interviewer's mind, you should be in a much better position to take control of the interview and shine.

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Devoxx: The Problem with Women – A Technical Approach

As well as talking about, you know, actual work-type-stuff, I was encouraged to give my "Technical Approach to Women" presentation at Devoxx. This went so well at JavaOne that I thought it would be difficult to top. Also, I wasn't convinced it would work at Devoxx, because the theatres are not well suited to audience participation - the seats are warm and comfy, the room is dark, the speaker is on stage in front of a massive screen....

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Agile++: When Agile Goes Well

If you see anything about LMAX - the Disruptor, Continuous Delivery, or even the selection criteria for hiring developers, you'll see that LMAX is pretty keen on Agile. However, no-one's documented the Agile process there, as far as I know. Although I personally had it on my todo list, I never had the motivation, the hook to do it. And I realised eventually that's because I'm not sure it's a process that would work very well for another team, in another company, working in another business.

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