Rabea's ideas for talks

Rabea Gransberger: The idea to give a talk about code reviews was inspired by my daily work. Sometimes, I also get ideas for topics when I'm attending conferences.

For example, one of my talks was called "Effective IDE Usage." I've seen many people at conferences struggling to get the code to work correctly during their talks because they didn't use any of the content assist in the integrated development environment (IDE), so that is how I got the idea there.

When I did the functional libraries talk for Java 8, I just submitted the idea for the talk because I was interested in the topic myself. I wanted to find out if there were any nice libraries out there that my team could use in our company. When the talk was accepted, I was already doing all the preparational stuff and investigating the libraries.

Geertjan Wielenga: What were the main points in your talk about code reviews?

Rabea Gransberger: I made the point that every company should start doing code reviews. It's okay if you just start when you feel the need to do a code review. For example, if you have a change in a very critical component, you might think that somebody else should do a code review.

If you start like that, I think you get better results. Some companies say, "Every piece of code that we're writing has to have a review." I think people are driven away by the additional effort.

Geertjan Wielenga: What does a code review consist of?

Rabea Gransberger: A code review, for me, is just a very informal review: having a look at the code and writing down comments, and giving them back to the author of the code so he or she can improve the code.

Geertjan Wielenga: What kind of person should be the one doing the review?

Rabea Gransberger: The person doing the review should also be a person who has plenty of knowledge in the domain. So, for an optimal result from the code review, they should be part of the same team because this also gives the benefit that more than one person in the team knows the code. If some issues come up later, then there will be more than one person who can fix the code.

Geertjan Wielenga: What led you to go down this career path?

Rabea Gransberger: When I was still at university, I registered for a German forum where people would ask questions. It was just a general IT forum. I tried to answer the Java questions myself, even the things that I didn't understand at first. I usually tried to create a little test for myself and read up on things to see if I could actually solve the problem.

Then, in 2004, I got my first job as a Java developer when I was still a student. So, this was also how I got better at programming Java. After one year, somebody on the job told me that there's a debugger.

Nobody at university would ever tell you that there's a debugger! I was always fiddling around with System.out.println statements and my colleague asked, "Why are you using those? Just use the debugger." For me, it was kind of embarrassing. I was also angry that nobody at university ever told me about the debugger!

Geertjan Wielenga: How did you build on these experiences?

Rabea Gransberger: When I started at my current company in 2009, I had to learn a lot because the mineral oil/petrol station business domain, which is the focus of our work, is very specialized.

After two years, I was bored. There was nobody left to teach me anything about programming. I always wanted to become better at Java programming, so I was looking for other ideas.

I was reading The Java Specialists' Newsletter from Heinz Kabutz at the time and he had a special offer for participants of his regular online courses to attend his masterclass on the island of Crete. So, I flew there and did this four-day course. I was a junior Java developer at that time and the course was very challenging. I couldn't solve all of the exercises, but, apparently, I was good enough that Heinz kept in touch with me!