JAOO 2007: Bob Martin - Life in the Universe, Beautiful Code and Programming Discipline

Posted By: Charles | Oct 16th, 2007 @ 8:43 AM | 11,357 Views | 8 Comments
I recently got the chance to attend JAOO in Aarhus, Denmark. Besids learning a great amount about various approaches to solving hard problems that we all face as programmers (regardless of the stack we spend most of our time developing on), I got to meet so many interesting people from all walks of programmer life. What a great conference! For one thing, JAOO not about specifc products. It's not about one company's view of the world. It's not about one class of technologies or developer. It's not just about Java and LAMP or .NET and Windows.

Bob Martin is the CEO and founder of Object Mentor. He's also an incredible speaker and very passionate about creating "clean", precise, beautiful code. 

Bob keynoted this year's JAOO and his message was crystal clear: As professional developers, we need to write code in a professional way. What does that mean, exactly? Well, listen in. Bob explains in his usual clear, clean and concise way. You'll see Bob again in a subsequent interview (very fun one!) that took place at JAOO 2007.

Enjoy.
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#Oct 16th, 2007 @ 11:20 AM
Chadk
Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?
Ah at last. Jaoo videos.

Robert Martin did a fantastic key note, looking forward to see this video, after i have seen the one with kresten Smiley
#Oct 16th, 2007 @ 12:19 PM
Chadk
Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?
Isnt his name Robert Martin?

Good interview tho Smiley
#Oct 16th, 2007 @ 12:30 PM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change
Chadk wrote:
Isnt his name Robert Martin?

Good interview tho


That's his full name, yes. People call him Bob, which is a common knickname for Robert.
C
#Oct 16th, 2007 @ 4:42 PM
jsampsonPC
jsampsonPC
SampsonBlog.com SampsonVideos.com
Nice video. Might I suggest one of those fancy wind-cancellation mics for outdoor interviews though? Smiley
#Oct 16th, 2007 @ 10:10 PM
JChung2006
JChung2006
I'm sorry, but "write code that doesn't suck" is worthless advice.  Better advice would be "how to convince the folks who pay for code that beautiful code is worth paying for."
#Oct 17th, 2007 @ 12:58 PM
DannyJ
DannyJ
Great interview - Totally agree with the need to write nice and clean code, less time debugging, less time figuring out what the heck some else's class/module is supposed to do, etc... Although I agree that in reality it doesn't always happen as bosses don't appreciate the shear amount of effort that goes into a software project - they just want it done as quickly as possible just so they can make money / look good in front of their boss etc...

One thing I like to do is look at all the software projects I've done in the past and group together all of the common functionality and then create nice clean class wrappers that handle the functionality that all of the previous solutions used.
#Oct 21st, 2007 @ 12:32 PM
Bernal
Bernal
Responding to some of the comments here...

Writing clean code doesn't have to mean that you spend a lot of time writing and re-writing code to make it clean. The idea that deadlines and budgets mean you have to forego clean code is wrong. If you take the time to learn "how" to write clean code and you practice doing it, when crunch time comes you'll be able to write clean code as fast as you might write sloppy code. The catch is that most programmers don't practice the "art of coding" with the goal of creating something clean and elegent and instead only code when "on-the-clock" and under pressure to finish what they're working on.
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