Here’s what I’m up to these days:

I now work for the Emerging Solutions group of BJC HealthCare. So far I’m loving it. I’ve been reunited with a couple of colleagues: Pat, who I worked with at MetaMatrix, and Paul who I worked with at Monsanto. My timing was fortunate: my first real work is to be on a team that is kicking off a new, large web portal. Technology includes Spring (MVC, Web Flow, Security), Hibernate, Velocity, Maven, CVS, web services. Development tools are Eclipse, the Atlassian tools (Bamboo, FishEye, Crucible, Jira, Confluence), GreenHopper (a Jira plugin giving a Scrum-centric view). We do scrum and even have two certified ScrumMasters.

Another colleague, Ryan Senior, has started within ES a shadowy secret cabal known as the Dead Coders Society. The group meets informally for an hour every few weeks and discusses some technology, book, or whatnot. We met this week, it was my second meeting; the group has just finished up Bob Martin’s Clean Code and then we voted on what to do next. We ultimately decided to read Guy Steele’s two Lambda Papers in preparation for tackling Real World Haskell.

Which segues nicely into the Lambda Lounge. This local functional and dynamic languages interest group has given me, and many others, the language itch. I believe Ryan (another regular) got the idea from λL to propose both the lambda papers and Real World Haskell. There has already been one Haskell presentation, and there are two more scheduled. I’ll be presenting on the Fan programming language in July. Fan is considerably less mind-bending for a Java programmer than something like Haskell, but nonetheless it is an enjoyable learning experience and I’m looking forward to presenting. I also implemented a Fan vending machine for the language shootout last month.

In other news, earlier this year I released a new version of my church’s website which I built using WordPress. It’s central feature is essentially a podcast of the audio of each sermon. I’d like to blog more about this in great deal, I learned quite a bit in the process. While I’m happy with the result – it is a quantum leap beyond the old site – I’ve already got a long mental list of improvements. First up – refactor away a lot of hardcoded behavior and, if possible, find or make WordPress plugins instead.

By the way, as I publish this I am sitting in the audience of the St. Louis Java User’s Group, watching Matt Taylor present about Groovy and Test Driven Development. He is writing an application from scratch live on stage using Groovy and TDD.

Once again, the Lambda Lounge did not disappoint.

This month’s mind-bending topics included Factor, presented by Kyle Cordes, and Perl 6/Parrot, presented by Charles Sharp. Both of these guys are great speakers, I make it a point not to miss their talks.

Appistry again very generously hosted the λ Lounge and supplied Fortel’s pizza and beverages.

Jim Brasunas took a few minutes to talk about ITEN, a non-profit group which helps support ventures and startups. I think everyone was surprised to hear that there are nearly 100 technology-related startups in the St. Louis area.

We’ve been really spoiled by some great presentations and great speakers, so I don’t know what I was thinking when I volunteered to speak about the Fan programming language in July. Tonight I took notes during both talks, and I think I’ve spotted a few patterns that help to make any programming language presentation better.

1. Go ahead and do a Hello World program, but…
2. …a fibonacci sequence program has emerged as a must-have. It’s like the new Hello World.
3. Keep things moving along. The slides/software can always be made available later or even made into handouts, as Kyle did.
4. I like to hear just enough background to get an appreciation of where the language is coming from. What persons are involved? What are they trying to accomplish? What (if any) languages preceeded this language? Kyle and Charles both struck just the right note here, imho.
5. How concise is the language? How productive does it make you?
6. What real-world projects/accomplishments are associated with this language?
7. What idioms are unique/advantageous in this language?

I’m very much looking forward to the language shootout next month, as I believe everyone is.

Just a quick post – tomorrow evening at the St. Louis Java User’s Group, Kyle Cordes will be giving a presentation on Git. I’m looking forward to this both because Kyle is a very good and accomplished speaker on technical topics, and also because I’m eager to learn more about this distributed source control tool. Hope to see you there!