Last night's IASA Atlanta meeting was a good one. The main topic was a panel discussion around 'Design Patterns'. Unfortunately, I thought the names of the speakers were on the IASA website, so I didn't write them down (Please comment if you know their names and I'll update this.)
The discussion started with a definition by each of the presenters of what 'Design Patterns' are. The crowd then got involved with their definitions, where they have seen abuses of patterns and suggestions for how to present patterns to their work environments. Having worked almost exclusively with experienced engineers (or junior engineers who ate up anything new or interesting that they didn't know) I was surprised by some of the suggestions and challenges those working in bigger companies had to introduce these concepts. As part of the discussion on how to introduce patterns into an organization we got into a discussion about how people learn and how some (like me) have a 'gut' feeling about what parts of a complex topic can be skipped until later to get the bigger picture. Great discussion on this with the group as well.
About an hour into the session the subject changed to hiring questions, including a favorite of mine: 'what have you read recently?', or how I ask it 'what do you do to keep current with the changing technologies?'. Several good suggestions for Pod casts and RSS/email lists. My suggestion was IBM's developerWorks. I get both the email and the RSS feeds. A number of people joked about the answers they received to these questions. My personal favorite is a candidate who 'reads the internet'. When asked for more details he said he surfs around looking for articles and posts.
One of the group asked about certifications and whether they were useful metrics when hiring or when looking for a job. I personally don't put a lot of weight into them. Some are non-trivial to obtain, but a lot of them have a lot of fraud behind them. I've (unfortunately) interviewed enough engineers (software, network and hardware) who were certified MS-this or Novell-that and Cisco-whatever who couldn't explain the basics of where they used these technologies or answer non-trivial questions. There was also a lot of fraud during the earlier part of this decade where people were paying examiners to pass them and some 'training' companies even advertised they could guarantee you'd pass. One of the IASA officers countered with the rigorous testing that you need to reach the more advanced Java certifications, so I need to look into that some more.
Bringing the discussion back on topic (part of the reason I enjoy these meetings is they tend to be very interactive with the crowd and the speakers/organizers let things get off topic for a little while if the group wants it to.) we talked about Anti-patterns. The general consensus was that 'anti patterns' are mostly about personnel and management, but have a place in development. One comment was the the people interested in patterns hate anti-patterns. I personally enjoy reading about anti-patterns so I can see if I'm doing something others flag as bad, or my organization is, or to see what things can go wrong as we implement a new process or technology so we can avoid them.
The last few minutes were a discussion of patterns again, with Burk asking if this was a topic we wanted to cover again. I chimed in that I thought it was a good idea, but to include more advanced/complex patterns since most people with an architect title or role should know the basics like singleton or command.
There was one mention of scrum, in passing. One mention of offshoring, again in passing. (Both of these usually lead to some detailed discussion, but not tonight.)
It was also one of the best attending meetings in a long time. Lots of the same faces, but plenty of new ones.
At the end I got to check out the Kindle that one of the speakers uses. Pretty impressive device, I may need to add it to my Christmas list.
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