40withegg

I have been practicing Extreme Programming (XP) agile software development in many different incarnations for 7 years. Sometimes it has been great, and other times it has been more or less imaginary… if a coder practices XP and nobody is around to see it, is he really doing it at all? Here is a brief history of my life as a software developer, with certain names excluded to protect the innocent, guilty, clueless, and paranoid:

About seven and a half year ago I graduated from college with a degree in Management Information Systems. This means that my education was split between business classes and computer science classes, though there was less emphasis on the “science” part. I have never had to write a sorting algorithm, network stack, or slog through many of the other computer science “character building” exercises. I will admit that I’m somewhat of a programming snob, but in the opposite direction than most programming snobs: I’ve never written in C, never thought of VI or EMACS as anything other than a major pain in my butt, and never invented a new distributed file sharing protocol. Hey, I’m not denying that those things would have made me smarter, or that they would have been useful, but there are people way better at that stuff than I am, and they seem more than willing to let me download their hard work so I don’t have to waste my time figuring out my own solution.

I was recruited strait out of college by large major insurance company that had come to a very sobering conclusion: their entire business was built around technology more than 20 years old, people who knew it were starting to retire. They figured that they needed to hire a bunch of young whipper-snappers to infuse the organization with able bodied programmers for years to come. On top of that, there was this new programming language called Java that was all the rage, so teach the newbies that stuff. And that’s what they did.

After a few months of training by expensive consultants, I was dropped into the middle of one of the first major Java projects. I had never done any real world programming and I was pretty freaked out. On top of that, there were these people called “contractors”, and I quickly learn that “contractor” meant “a really smart person that you should listen too because they are super expensive.” Little to my knowledge, the contractors really were top-notch people in the Object Oriented analysis/design world, and in my two years there I was exposed to a series of top level consultants that really new their OO. All of them were from the Smalltalk world, also known as The Language That Kicks Ass Over Whatever Language You Are Using Right Now And Yes, I AM Bitter About It Thank You Very Much.

(As an aside: if you’re ever around some really smart OO minded people, drop a few generic phrases about Smalltalk, such as “This never would have been a problem if we were using Smalltalk” or “It would have been so much easier to do it in Smalltalk” or “Blah blah blah VisualWorks blah blah”. Your OO ranking will go way up in their mind.)

My first programming job at the insurance company was to write JUnit tests. It’s pretty cool to think that in 1998 that JUnit was my first programming framework. But the consultants were tuned in to this weird “Extreme Programming” thing and realized that unit tests were important on many fronts: code quality, documentation, business logic verification, etc. This was great for me from a career development point of view because I had no programming habits yet: I was a blank slate. God, I’m lucky that I fell in with that group rather than the procedural programming group.

After a few years it was obvious that the project was going to fail. I remember laughing out loud while reading The Dilbert Principal, by Douglas Adams: there was chapter about company projects, and the final section was titled “Finishing the Project”, followed by a blank page. That ended the chapter. Anyway, the Dot-Com boom was really, uh, booming, and the XP-minded consultants that had done tours at the insurance company wanted me to bail out and join them at a startup. I did.