Introducing Rabea Gransberger

Rabea Gransberger is a software engineer and co-leads the software development department at MEKOS. She is also a well-known speaker at Java conferences and user groups around the world. Rabea is a Java Champion and started the Bremen Java User Group in 2012. She doesn't necessarily see herself as a developer advocate, rather her main focus is on keeping the code base clean and educating her team, and developers around the world, to write better code. Find Rabea on Twitter: @rgransberger.

Geertjan Wielenga: Can you explain who you are and what you do?

Rabea Gransberger: I'm from Germany and I work in Bremen as a software developer, department lead, and project manager. So, it's a bit of everything.

In my team, we mainly get our tasks from our customers and we are in the nice position of having two major customers that allow us to work in an agile way. They give us some tasks, we prioritize the tasks together, and then we can pick the tasks that have high priority, along with some smaller ones, which are good for filling up the sprint.

We have a team of five developers and I'm responsible for architectural design and educating the team, as well as completing tasks from the sprint. I'm trying to educate the team by doing code reviews and hands-on labs. For example, when Java 8 came out, we had internal training sessions where we solved some streams and lambda exercises to get some practical experience with the new APIs.

Geertjan Wielenga: At conferences, you often talked about code reviews. What started that?