Katrina Owen – Here be Dragons

Recently I was fortunate to be able to attend a talk arranged by Pivotal Labs in which Katrina Owen gave a talk on the topic of being a good citizen when we develop software.

Katrina Owen

Katrina is a Developer I first heard about when she was a regular on the Ruby Rogues podcast.

Pivotal Labs

Pivotal Labs is an agile consultancy who have offices world wide. Amongst other things they put on several events including a weekly lunch talk each Wednesday from their offices in Old Street, London.

The Talk

The talk itself was a fun run through of some bug and bad pattern laden code. We all had a good time poking fun at the developer(s) who came before.

The crux of the talk was around the prisoners dilemma and that how if you know someone has chosen the lazy path that the easiest path would be to continue along the lazy path and not improve the code.

However if you take the time to improve the code base as you go along then others will see this path being laid and hopefully follow it for maximum reward.

The Slides

Here are the slides from the talk;

The Video

I was able to find an older video of the same talk she gave back in 2015

Wrapping Up

The talk was really well received, Katrina was as interesting and articulate as she comes across in the Ruby Rogues podcast.

I am keeping an eye out for future events held at Pivotal as they certainly know how to put on good talks.

If you want to learn more about how I write up conference talks, I’ve written about it!