Clare Sudbery
Biography
Clare Sudbery is an independent technical coach with over 20 years of software engineering experience. She specialises in TDD, refactoring, continuous integration and other eXtreme Programming (XP) practices.
Clare taught the Coding Black Females’ Return to Tech programme and co-ran Made Tech’s academy – coaching inexperienced engineers to learn on the job. She has a passion for helping under-represented groups to flourish in tech.
Clare hosted Season One of the acclaimed Making Tech Better podcast and publishes content on Medium (“A Woman in Technology”) and her own site (“In Simple Terms”). She is the author of the Stupidity Manifesto, has written about trunk-based development and refactoring for O’Reilly and for Martin Fowler’s site, and regularly presents workshops and keynotes at events all over the world.
NewCrafts Paris 2025
Continuous Integration – That’s not what they meant
Talk
Many teams are practising continuous integration, or at least that’s the language they use. There are other terms in use too, such as continuous delivery and continuous deployment. The exact distinction between these terms depends on who you ask. But the big question is, just how continuous is it really?
Trunk-based development (TBD) is a powerful yet under-used technique for tightening the user feedback loop, lowering risk and minimizing the gap between coding and deployment. It’s a major component of good deployment practice, and many argue that anything other than trunk-based development does not technically qualify as continuous integration. But many developers are either not sure what TBD is, or do not feel able to use it.
This talk digs into the detail and the benefits of trunk-based development, and gives practical advice on how to make good use of the technique.
Key takeaways:
• What trunk-based development actually means
• The connection between continuous integration and trunk-based development
• The key practices and skills needed to make trunk-based development work
• How to gradually move towards better continuous integration, even if trunk-based development is not your goal
Previous events
NewCrafts Paris 2023
Compassionate Refactoring
Talk
Most coders wish they were refactoring their code more than they are.
Many things stand in our way (or so we think): The obvious one is time, and the associated pressure from our stakeholders. This is a real problem, and in this talk I will discuss ways of addressing it.
But one constraint that isn't often discussed is a lack of compassion. This doesn't only come from others, it comes from ourselves. We don't forgive ourselves when we write bad code. We think it's all or nothing. We mutter about the trail of bad code left by our forbears and feel guilty about the bad code we leave behind ourselves.
Refactoring shouldn't be something that happens after the fact - it should be, and can be, part of every day development. But before we write good code we have to write bad code, and that's OK. As with most creative endeavours if you insist on making the first draft perfect you will never get anything out the door.
This talk is about kindness and forgiveness, and the paradox that the more you accept and handle bad code, the more likely it is that you will end up with good code.
