Early careers Workshop

This one-day workshop is exclusively for software developers at the start of their careers: placement students, final year undergraduates and graduate level employees. In the company of other delegates at a similar level of experience, you will receive clear and practical guidance about key skills in your work from supportive tutors.

Think of this session as a short, practical course in honing your craft as a junior software developer. You will tackle a hands-on exercise in pairs or small groups , as you might expect at a workshop. But in this session every pair or group will include one of the tutors, not showing you how to do it but guiding and supporting you as you tackle it for yourself.

To make the most of the exercise there will be plenty of review and discussion. The team has enviable experience of skills across the lifecycle and sharing these with an audience. They’ll be presenting at the workshop, but rather than delivering a generic talk they’ll be sharing their knowledge as it applies to the problem at hand so that you can see what it means in a concrete example you’ve encountered. We’ll also invite delegates themselves to share insights they discover during the workshop, in the form of “pop-up lightning talks”. This is an opportunity to practise sharing your thoughts with a small, friendly, supportive audience while also cementing your learning. A private channel on the conference Discord server will be available too.

LOGISTICS Having the right tools is only part of the solution: knowing what to do with it and how to use it well makes the bigger difference. However, you WILL need a laptop! The exercise can be done in C++, Python, C# or Java - we’ll ask you when you register which languages you know so that we can plan accordingly. You will be working in pairs or groups, so if you’re not 100% comfortable with a language that’s not a problem. This workshop is not, after all, a programming language masterclass. You just need to be able to write and execute a simple program in one or more of these languages.

TOPICS Through the course of the day you will have the opportunity to discuss and experience: Process Architecture Testing Coding practices Differences between paradigms Debugging Legacy code
Refactoring
Communication Deployment