by Diana Dima
Last week we had our recurrent Learning Days, an exciting 2-days internal event dedicated to learning above everything else. We went back to the articles we saved or to the online courses we never had time for and we finally prioritized them.
Every Learning Days series brings different organized learning experiences and a general impulse for professional development. More than 10 interesting subjects were covered in this session and out of all the topics, we would like to highlight the story of Boilerplate Summit.
What is Boilerplate?
According to Wikipedia, in computer programming, Boilerplate is consisting in sections of code that have to be included in many places with little or no alteration. Such boilerplate code is particularly salient when the programmer must include a lot of code for minimal functionality.
A related phenomenon, bookkeeping code, is code that is not part of the business logic but is interleaved with it to keep data structures updated or able to handle secondary aspects of the program.
During Boilerplate Summit we focused on defining our boilerplate together with all the senior professionals in IT Smart Systems.
Almost six months ago, we commenced a transformational process across our organization, moving from technology dispersed teams to more unification, more sharing and more transparency across technologies. From six departments, four of which were made up of teams on similar technologies we ended up with five departments built around the same technology stack. All five departments became responsible for all initiatives, standards and development practices on their core practice.
This transformation actually meant the unification of teams that historically did not work together, into one team that will from now on share the same technology stack, even though the professionals are approaching work and development differently from one another. And this brings us to our Boilerplate talk.
In a couple of hours,11 of our senior colleagues self-managed to align development practices for the whole Digital Transformation Department by:
sorting out API definitions
creating a wiki backend to be used in every onboarding process from now on
creating a development standard based on Springboot java, Springcould and Data Bases to be used by each and every existing colleague.
During the Boilerplate Summit were also discussions about integrating Sonar Lint in every local environment used as part of the process.
Our next step will be to build a journey catalog to be used in pre-sales and reusable modules, at the start of any project. Based on the structure created in this summit, we will move on to create libraries and modules and centralize them for future use as well.
Stay tuned for more insights on our technical breakthroughs and exciting learning opportunities that might spring on from where you wouldn't usually expect!