Agile Saturday XI

Summary of Agile Saturday XI conference.

Keynote The Soul of a Developer by Jaan Pullerits (MYJAR)

All pictures are taken from Agile Saturday XI Facebook album
I liked it. I can't say that it was very useful (does keynote should be useful?), but it was well told presentation with ideal structure.
Phrase of the talk – you should analyze yourself before others do.

Hope management in web applications from pentester's point of view by Elar Lang (Clarified Security)

Nive and useful talk. Some notes from it:

• It was interesting to hear statistics about popular passwords in Estonia (not in the world or in USA). For example, a lot of passwords are some kind of modification of username. The most popular pattern in Estonia is first capital letter and number at the end (for example, User1).
• In Estonia if authentication is done only with username and password it's the first vulnerability.
• If you trust your password to the server you actually blindly trust it to the sysadmin (unknown man).
• If sysadmin creates rules for passwords, it makes users to create weak passwords (with patterns).
• If you build the team of juniors you can't expect quality (such as security).

And Elar Lang explained with one gif how people test their own code (as a tester who writes a code from time to time I confirm that it is true independently of you testing skills):

MVP-s At TransferWise - How To Build As Much As Needed And As Little As Possible by Peep Pullerits (TransferWise)
I didn't like it at all. The description of the talk was absolutely wrong. Basically speaker just made some simple prototype with Angular in front of the whole auditory. And it was meant to show how easy and quickly we can create prototypes. First of all – yea, actually you shouldn't always even code prototype, you can just draw it. Secondly, if you code something the most difficult part is to think up the logic of the application – he already did it at home. The second time-taking part is to create design (css styles) – he already had it as well. Thirdly, while he was coding (for n time) he had some bugs and answers how to fix them came from the audience, so you can't say how long does they take when you are alone.
And speaker did no summary or no analysis – just code, which supposed to be the proof.

Teaching Young Hackers by Peeter Marvet

Nice talk (looks like keynote).

• Many teachers now are trying to teach kids to code in some language (python). This is wrong way, because language is just a tool. If teachers want to develop a thinking skill (which programming can help to develop), then they must to teach programming itself (not language) and to teach it with fun (so kids wanted to code to achieve some goal).
• Making your application with copied parts of code from StackOverflow doesn't make you a programmer (or at least makes you very bad/pour programmer).
• Speaker advised some interesting game for "learning to hack": https://hackerexperience.com.

Keynote Agile Is A Bad Strategy Or 5 Things Every Agile Practitioner Should Know About Strategy by Hanno Jarvet (Jarvet Consulting)

Basically I liked it – the speaker was very good with clear message and beautiful language, but it wasn't useful, again – nothing new. But, actually, perfect talk for keynote.

Lunch

One of the disadvantages of the conference was badly organized lunch (we waited in the queue for 40 minutes).

Briefing

One of the big advantages – briefing of the talks at the beginning of the conference. Each (or almost each) speakers briefly present their talks, so you can choose which one you want to visit not only by reading the description but also by seeing how speaker speaks (which is important). They do it at the every Agile Saturday conference – very good tradition.


Previous Agile Saturday conferences were held at the hotels, this one – at the university. So this time I had feeling that it's not conference, but some regular lectures at the university. Weird feeling.