Carole Rennie Logan

About this time of year for the last few years I write a blog post about going to Umbraco Codegarden. But this year it’s a bit different… I arrived in Odense a few days earlier as I was invited to the pre conference retreat.

A 5am alarm is never fun, but as much as I was tired I was excited to be travelling to Frankfurt. I was on my way to Umbraco Festival Deutschland (UFD18) where I was attending the conference aswell as giving a talk. I travelled with my husband as we were extending the trip and using it is a chance to visit Germany for the first time!

Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is next up on my reading list. Recommended by another dev, it’s a collection of short one or two page chapters explaining a piece of advice. The main theme is changing the way you work with advice from the authors, the founders of basecamp.

Recently I have been getting more interested in the people side of work, how we work together to get the best results. Getting this right is way harder than the coding side, right?!

I have written a few of these “developer diary” blogs when I go to conferences or meetups, but this one is a bit different as I was on the other side as I was on the organising team do the event: DDD Scotland.

Talking with Tech Leads by Patrick Kua is next up on my developer book club list. It is a series of interviews with tech leads at varying experience levels.

On Tuesday 23rd January we had our first Ladies of Code Glasgow meetup of the year. This month session was something we hadn’t done before: Lean Coffee. I have attended other local meetups in this format and I think it’s a great way to let everyone have their voice heard… and as a meetup organiser it takes the pressure off finding a speaker!

Next up in “developer book club” theme is The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olsen Laney. Not necessary something that will be relevant for all developers but it has helped me understand myself both personally and professionally so thought I would include it.

You may have heard of Ellen Pao, at least as “that women who sued the VC company” or “The CEO that censored reddit”. I had heard of these stories and followed her on Twitter before I got the book. Listening to all these things that happened, you wouldn’t actually believe it all happened to one person.

As mentioned in my recent blog post, I have decided to: #1: read more #2: blog about it! So here we go with the first book: Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg.