At every software development conference, the rooms are filled with speakers wanting to teach you the newest framework or the hottest programming language.

Is the only measure of your worth as a developer *what* you do – the practices or processes you use? Or does it also matter *why* you do things that way – the reasoning and the evidence behind your decisions?

At Wufoo, everyone has to wear multiple hats in our company and that includes manning the inbox and doing customer support every single week. One of the interesting side effects of having a company where designers, developers and even the accountant writing documentation and answering support emails, is that everyone has a stake in making sure the application is as easy to use as possible.

None of us would be very good software developers if we never had arguments about The Best Way to Do Things. But I’ve had enough silly arguments about tabs-versus-spaces to last me the rest of my life. When should we stop arguing and start writing code?

Iterating faster, avoiding bugs through tools, and improved automated testing are great ideas, but in this keynote presentation from HTML5DevConf, Google’s Paul Irish will show how to really incorporate them into a functional and realistic developer workflow. Additionally, Paul gives us an overview of Yeoman and shows how this set of tools and libraries can help developers quickly build elegant and compelling web apps.

Inspiration strikes you, you’ve done it. You have found the missing 7 letters from the MVC model. This changes everything. You start discussing it with your pair. 10 minutes later you somehow find yourself arguing if mocks are good or bad.

Clojure is often described as a small Java library for some concurrency improvements. It’s not easy to write a proper concurrent application on JVM and any help in this area is always warmly welcome. In general, Clojure is a Lisp-like functional programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

A few decades ago, many developers in the industry often listened to a single big vendor and followed all their advice and lived in their world. Then came the era of using large open source frameworks and moving into that mindset and community.

In your dream, you’re standing in front of a room full of dozens of people, presentation mouse in hand, about to present to them on (insert software development topic here). You wake up in a cold sweat. You’re either terrified, or excited and terrified. Are you ready to start presenting? This video reveals the secrets to building and giving successful technical presentations!

Winston Churchill famously said, “First we shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us.” Software developers are constantly debating their choices of language, platform, editor, methodology, and even where to put the curly braces. The robust internal dialog in our community is a healthy thing, but our debates are often focused on the wrong topics. Have you ever compared languages by performance benchmarks? Platforms by alleged claims of developer productivity? Methodologies by feature velocity? Then there is a very good chance you’re doing it wrong.