Speaker: Katrina Owen

Ecosystem engineer @github

Katrina is an ecosystem engineer at GitHub. She accidentally became a developer while pursuing a degree in molecular biology. When programming, her focus is on automation, workflow optimization, and refactoring. She works primarily in Go and Ruby, contributes to several open source projects, and is the creator of exercism.io, a platform for code practice and programming mentorship.

Talk : Succession: A Refactoring Story

Track : Developer Experience: Level up Your Engineering Effectiveness
Location : Broadway Ballroom North Center, 6th fl.
Day of week : Friday
Duration : 11:50am - 12:40pm

Refactoring sometimes devolves into an appalling mess. You're chasing  a broken test suite, and every change just makes it worse. At other  times it's a slow, controlled process culminating in dreadful design.  This talk presents an end-to-end refactoring that demonstrates simple  strategies to avoid such misadventures.   

Duplication catches our eye, yet much of design is about encapsulating  differences. Focusing on the bits that are alike leads to awkward  abstractions. Focusing on meaningful differences provides a better  outcome.   

The talk explores a meticulous style of refactoring that Martin Fowler  alludes to in his book:   

> [The] rhythm of refactoring: 
> test, small change, test small change, test small change.   

If every step is safe, then the test suite should never fail. Taking  this idea to its extreme results in an artificial but potent  constraint: stay one undo away from green. This constraint, which  can initially seem awkward and mechanical offloads a morass of  details into the process—freeing your working memory and reducing  cognitive load. This is a powerful approach to keeping your code deployable, even while making dramatic changes.

Other talks from track Developer Experience: Level up Your Engineering Effectiveness

Better DevEx at Netflix: Polyglot and Containers
Manager of Developer Productivity @Netflix and Co-Host of the Productivity Engineering Silicon Valley Meetup
Mike McGarr
Platforms at Twilio: Unlocking Developer Effectiveness
Senior Director Platform Engineering @twilio
Justin Kitagawa
Help! I Accidentally Distributed My System!
Software Engineer & Engineering Manager @Honeycombio
Emily Nakashima
Help! I Accidentally Distributed My System!
Developer Programs Engineer @Google
Rachel Myers
Software Is Eating the World, ML Is Going to Eat Software
Language Designer Working on Tooling @Facebook, worked on TypeScript, F#, & Swift
Joe Pamer

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