Software Craftsmanship comes to Richmond, Va

I recently attended the Meet and Code Dinner.  This user group is in the process of resetting itself as the Richmond Software Craftsmanship Group.  I really love that idea.  I've been following the Software_Craftsmanship group for a little while, and I really like the discussions that come out of that group.  I'm excited that there is enough interest in the Richmond area to get a group like this going.  My hats off to Justin, Kevin, and Harper for getting this going.  In its previous incarnation, the Meet and Code Dinners were becoming more of a standard, eyes-forward presentations.  Now, they are consciously trying to make the meetings interactive discussions with little-to-no formal presentations.

Last week's meeting was a great roundtable discussion centered around Testing Legacy Code.  Al Tenhundfeld gave a short intro to the topic, and kicked off the discussion with some specific items he was interested in.  From there, we just ran with it.  The discussion went much more broad than the original topic, but I felt like it was a lively discussion and I look forward to the next one.

Hello World

I've finally taken the plunge in creating a blog.  We'll see how it goes.  I have some lofty plans this year for learning new languages and platforms, I hope to share my experiences here.  As for what to expect for future posts, look for a wide range of topics.  For example, my desk is now holding the following books:

• Agile Testing
• Groovy Recipes
• Real World Sharepoint 2007
• Planning Extreme Programming
• Testing Extreme Programming

I don't know many people who list Groovy and SharePoint in the same breath when talking about their interests.  So my topics will probably be all over the place.  Topics I am looking to cover in the next week will include building, testing, and deploying SharePoint solutions with Continuous Integration.  I have some new SharePoint projects coming up at work and I hope to incorporate them with either CruiseControl.NET or Hudson.