Elegant Code » Community

I’m on Twitter. Now what?

David Starr — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 04:35:57 +0000

I just set up on Twitter and got everything set up, I think.

http://twitter.com/DaddyStarr

So, how do I get the most out of this? Should I switch to Jabber?

Can I tweet from MSN Messenger?

Who should I follow?

Will I care about this in 1 month?

Boise Open Spaces Recap

Guest Blogger — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 04:00:50 +0000

Boise’s first Open Spaces event was a raging success (IMHO). Thanks to Scott for organizing the event, and Jarod for guiding us through the (non) process. I hope that we can repeat the event soon with a wider audience and longer duration.

I sat in on 3 groups, the first as a full member and the last two as a bumblebee. Here are my rough notes from each session. Most of these are just the questions that we hashed through without the answers, I guess you had to be there for that.

Domain Driven Domain
- Do you choose Repository or Active Record?
  - Can a dynamic language give you the quick ramp up of Active Record and the long-term maintainability of Repository?
- How do Domain Specific Languages relate to DDD?
  - What if you create a DSL to define your business rules?
Teaching Object Relational Mapping to junior developers
- Which ORM do you choose?
  - - In the .NET world it seemed to boil down to a choice between
      - NHibernate
        
        LINQ for SQL
        
        Castle Active Record (apparently built on top of NHibernate)
    - Java
      - Hibernate like mapping (EJB, JPA, etc…)
        
        Start the junior developer off learning the domain model and try to isolate them from the object-relational impedance through HSQL
      - iBatis approach
        
        Expose them to the internals of the relational database and make the mapping to the domain process manual
Technical leaders moving into management
- Two different tracks that exist at a lot of companies
  - Technical track
  - Management track
  - Both are intended to have similar pay and promotional opportunities
  - At smaller companies, this dual track doesn’t always exist and technical people are forced into management to chase promotions
- As a technical leader (ie Architect) how do you stay “in the code enough” to make competent long-term technical decisions?
  - Make sure your code is architected so you can recover from poor mistakes
    - For example be able replace your persistence layer in 2 weeks, mitigating a poor persistence layer technology decision.
  - Will your developers feel like you are the non-coding architect passing down edicts from above without knowing the details or impact?
The event closed with a great pissing match of who has worked on the largest system, I think Chris and Jarod tied for first place.

Bring a Friend (Why Have An Elegant Code Open Spaces Session?)

Jason Grundy — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:37:28 +0000

Last week Scott announced a Elegant Code Open Spaces Session. But why are we doing this? Obviously when answering this question I am speaking for myself and not necessarily the rest of the Elegant Coders…although who could possibly disagree with the constructed and reasonable argument that follows!?

There are basically two reasons for me to personally participate in various community events:

The selfish answer is that I want to make myself better.
The unselfish answer is that I want to make other people better too.

The second one of these is hard. One thing that was re-emphasized for me during Seattle was that the biggest challenge that any community faces is converting the unbelievers. Obviously most of the people who turn up for ALT.NET events have bought into the ideas (I am not going to go down the rat hole of defining what those ideas are). But how do we increase the number of people who are aware of and hopefully buy into some of the ALT.NET dogma?

The problem was well illustrated in the Are Auto Mocking Containers (AMC) Evil session in Seattle . The amount of concepts that need to be understood and pain that must have been experienced to even reach the point when an AMC comes into play is enormous. So how do you take your stereotypical Mort (I am not using this term in derogatory way) and at least make them aware that there might be another way to do things?

When we were discussing this problem over lunch we came up with the idea of the Open Spaces session. It sounds kinda lame but the idea for each Elegant Coder is to “bring a friend” who might be open to some new ideas and at it’s core that’s what this event is all about. It’s going to be a lot of fun…

I’m on …

Jan Van Ryswyck — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:10:35 +0000

… Twitter. Why? Because all the cool kids are doing it (yep, I have no spine). Let’s see where this goes.

Boise Technical Community

David Starr — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:19:46 +0000

I recently realized just how vibrant and thriving our local technical community is here in Boise, Idaho. Although I hear things in the ether about events and user groups I have never really stopped to see how many opportunities there are out there for us. Wow. A little surfing and Googling turns up these gems and I bet there are many more I am unaware of out there.

User Groups

Most of these groups are monthly meetings of individuals with similar interests.

Less Frequent Gatherings

These events tend to be a bit bigger and are typically full day affairs.