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

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.