the ‘bee log

Thanks to the folks that came out to the Oklahoma City CodeCamp, I had a fun time as evidenced here. (The fact that Mac OS comes with a comic-making application is just fantastic.) It was a blast hanging out with Ray, Scott, Evan, Ben and many, many other folks.

Scott Bellware graciously stepped in on the ping-pong pairing talk for a road weary JP and proved a fierce competitor. We managed to conscript some folks at the talk - Ben Schierman, Evan Hoff, and Ryan Hoegg - to help us demonstrate the pairing game. We had a chance to talk (heatedly) about pairing, TDD, and some finer points of object design in the wild. It was really quite a fun experience for me. I’ve posted the slides and code from the talk for the interested. The panel discussion was another high point for me. I have to give props to Cory Smith for making the Agilists defend and articulate their claims; he’s a great devil’s advocate! While we were dealing with serious topics there were many moments of levity. Apparently in a heated moment Ben captured me saying:

When you fire up the debugger to verify something and then click stop, the ‘test’ that you just performed goes into the ether.  Every time someone does that, God kills a kitten…

I especially want to thank Raymond Lewallen and the Oklahoma City .NET developers for making all this happen. There’s some great leadership and talent in that part of the world. Talking to other developers with different experiences really fuels my fire for taking it to the next level. I sincerely appreciate the opportunity!