Welcome!

... to the digital home of Steven Schwenke.

This site is supposed to be a showcase for my thoughts about software engineering, less a personal homepage. If you want to know more about me, invite me to a beer.

 

Feedback via sweets

05 Feb 2017
Posted by Steven

A while ago, I conducted a full day workshop for my colleagues. In the middle of the day, I realized I forgot to decide which feedback technique to use at the end of the workshop. I used various ways of getting feedback during the years of giving workshops, but didn't feel like picking one of them. So I decided to improvise. With me, I had my usual "emergency ration" of sweets for the participants which hadn't been used yet.

How we do estimation meetings

15 Jan 2017
Posted by Steven

Recently, my team changed the schedule for estimation meetings. I use this opportunity to explain how we manage estimating the user stories in our backlog. This article is only about organizational aspects. Some thoughts about how to get to specific estimations can be found in my article "dealing with estimations".

Lessons Learned in Dezember 2016

03 Jan 2017
Posted by Steven

This is what I learned in Dezember 2016:

Writing awesome Java code workshop

02 Jan 2017
Posted by Steven

A couple of weeks ago, I gave another workshop for my colleagues in Braunschweig, Germany. The first thoughts for this workshop came to me months ago. I noticed that all developers I know are proficient in reading and writing Java code. They know the language concepts and syntactic rules. However, some of them struggle with coding elegantly and efficiently. I realized that basic concepts of "advanced Java programming" are not known or not understood.

Lessons Learned in October / November 2016

09 Dec 2016
Posted by Steven

This is what I learned in October and November 2016:

My new vertically adjustable desk

13 Nov 2016
Posted by Steven

Couple of months ago, I started looking for a new desk for my home office. Changes in my project caused me to work from home a lot. Also, a colleague told me about how great a vertically adjustable desk is for his health. "It simply is the difference between backache and no backache." After researching the topic, I decided to buy a Hammerbacher XDSM for 751,75€.

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