Have other topic ideas you'd like to share?

[joycelee11]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the topics we've added.

We'll continue to add new topics, but we'd love to hear your ideas.

If you have any topic ideas, please share them by creating a new discussion. Please include:

• Topic title
• Target audience (e.g. junior developers, aspiring developers, front-end developers, DevOps etc.)
• Topic details
• Speaker (yourself or developers you'd like to see)
• Questions you'd like to ask attendees

As long as developers would benefit from the topic, it can be as generic or specific as you'd like. Feel free to be as elaborate as you'd like. 

Thanks and we look forward to seeing your ideas.

[Rajjaa]

I would like to suggest this topic: How to estimate the cost of developing software?

[ChrisSchaller]

This is ambiguous in the current form, but a discussion around skills and strategies to estimate and review time spent on tasks in general would form the basis of such a topic. Not all of us end up quoting for work, but we do all need an understanding of the direct cost of our physical efforts as well as the indirect costs that might be associated with work like documentation, testing, deployment, training and user adoption. With estimating we generally estimate time, and then translate that time based on a dollars/hour basis to provide a quote to a customer. But that is not the same as the cost to our organization and to be profitable that is a fundamental issue. So perhaps "Understanding the costs of developing software". Is a precursor to estimation... I'm happy also if the title is "estimating" with content that addresses the real world costs to getting things done.

[rhdeck]

The business of software: how your work intersects with the success of the enterprise. Understand the motivations of investors, nontechnical colleagues and senior management.

[jenniferfu0811]

Great idea. While personal and technical growth is important, it's also important for developers to understand their company's goals in order to be successful. Do you have any anecdotes or tips you can share about how you go about understanding and tackling different stakeholders' needs?

[rhdeck]

Sure- one can start with the seemingly interminable interview process for a developer, particular at the junior end. Why does it take so long? This relates to the difficult connection between the cost of the developer and their contribution to either the cash flow or the equity value of the company. The more one understands how these connections work, the more one can anticipate the hard parts - and look for the easy ones. For example, figuring out the core competency of the company - if you have or can have that competency, that will help you align and be successful there. And if you don't, you know that this is at best a support role in the organization. Another is understanding subscription metrics - what the value is of a new customer vs keeping the current ones. Leads toward understanding customer success vs customer support. The former increases the wealth of the shareholders (and if you have options or RSUs - that means you!)

[rhdeck]

Machine learning: what is it beyond the hype? Get into the technical aspects. And how does understanding it make your code and product better?

[rhdeck]

No code for developers: what does it mean? Look at major and emerging no-code trends and split into what no code does well- and where strategic code unlocks a lot of value.

[jenniferfu0811]

Love this idea. What do you think about no-code? Do you think that's something developers have to worry about or do you think the trend will actually create more opportunities for developers?

[rhdeck]

Yes. Many developers will need to worry about it because no-code tools away a great deal of the use cases it does well that currently employ a lot of staff. However, no-code creates new opportunities: operating the tools, devops, composing solutions, plugins, integrations - the list goes on. The pie will grow on net.

[jenniferfu0811]

Hi Ray, we really liked this topic idea and opened a new discussion thread here so others can upvote and comment on it :) I just tagded you in the discussion. Let me know if there's anything details and questions you'd like to add to the thread.

[ChrisSchaller]

Level Up: How to leverage Caching in modern applications

The distance between simple backyard or hobby development and successful commercial software applications can usually be measured in performance. Users are impatient and don't like to wait, time is money right? Your app works great in your development environment, but after time it becomes slow for users in production? Often this is a symptom of data creep, or simply the fact that production resources are too expensive, usually it is because we are re-querying more data than we need, more often than we should.

Traditional data driven application developers moving into SaaS cloud or distributed computing will come across this just as much as developers just starting out.

Caching is a pattern that is not often described in "hello world" templates and guides but can be used to compliment most logic and business processes in some form to improve the efficiency, availability and throughput of data.

[jenniferfu0811]

Hi Chris, thanks for sharing this idea. We've opened a new discussion thread here on this topic for others to comment and upvote. I just tagged you in the discussion thread and would love to hear more about your thoughts.

[biolimbo]

📝 Top ideas and decisions to take in account when starting a project as a beginner dev or startup team 💡

Details:

• When a beginner wants to start to develop an idea into a working app, they lack the knowledge and experience in order to choose the app stack.
• That creates a lot of developer debts down the road and possibly even refactoring big parts (if not all) of the project.
• Developer debt and refactoring are big friction generators that can halt or completely stop the development of an idea.
• There are TONS of options to choose from in the sea of the development ecosystem, it becomes overwhelming and can cause decision fatigue or create the misleading appearance that you have to learn too much in order to take those decisions.
• How to determine priorities for each project and know where to stop to avoid getting into a rabbit whole of spending too much time on things that down the road we see were not as important.
• How to identify strengths and divide tasks between team members.

Speaker

Santiago Forero Molano - LinkedIn - GitHub

I'm an entrepreneur, fullstack dev & multimedia artist with 12 years of experience in multimedia content. CPO & Co-founder of Klaus Market, a content & ecommerce platform focused on offering customizable, performant, reliable and modular websites/apps. With more than 5 years of experience building javascript frontend and backend applications, with a deep focus on team management and developing from ideas to reality.

[ChrisSchaller]

Technical Debt, what is it and how can you avoid it
It's one of the biggest hidden costs and can be found in almost all projects, when left un-checked your project or application may stall due to this well before you get the chance to ship the last features.

We all agree it is bad, but what is Technical Debt? Can you quantify it? If it is so bad why do we keep taking out these bad loans that we do not have the capacity to service? In this session you'll learn how to identify some common forms of Technical Debt that we often leave in our wake and how you can start to become part of the solution instead of contributing to this cancerous problem.

[jenniferfu0811]

Thank you for sharing your ideas in this thread. We've just locked this thread so anyone can add topic ideas directly by creating a new discussion. You can add topics you'd like to speak on or hear about:

Must haves:

• Topic title
• Target audience (e.g. junior developers, aspiring developers, front-end developers, DevOps etc.)

Great to haves:

• Topic details
• Speaker (yourself or developers you'd like to see)

Good to have:

• Questions you'd like to ask attendees

Looking forward to the new ideas!