Reflections on our Software Development Jam

Yesterday, we hosted a Software Development Jam at Automation Alley in Troy, MI (North suburbs of Detroit, MI for those readers not in the Michigan area).

We billed the event as a way for developers to learn something about those software techniques that we are convinced are the important areas of growth in the future. Those areas were modern software engineering techniques (TDD, Continuous Integration, distributed version control), modern .NET (WPF, Silverlight), and modern Java platform tools (Scala, Jython, JRuby). We spent the morning going over some general software techniques, discussing what kinds of apps we’d want to build, what folks wanted to learn, and why. We spent the afternoon building samples and learning from each other.

The folks that attended were an interesting mix. We had people  with years of mainframe experience, people that had been teaching C++, and folks in the process of transitioning from IT Pro to developer track careers.

This was the kind of event that wouldn’t have been possible only a few years in the past. The availability of tools, frameworks, and trial editions helped.  Jay Wren setup an SVN server in the meeting room on a spare laptop. Then, he helped everyone get access to it. He also setup a CC.NET server so that all the samples were building throughout the day.  That was a fantastic way to show all the attendees the power of these tools.  If anyone got stuck on a sample later, they could do an SVN update and see a working sample. Others could ask them to checkin their failing build and get help from someone that wasn’t stuck at the time.  And the best part was that everyone could do an "SVN update” and get all the samples before leaving. Of course, everyone could see if anyone made mistakes by monitoring the CC.NET homepage on the internal LAN.

Mike Woelmer led a WPF tutorial in the afternoon. He also gave an overview of the differences between WPF and Silverlight. That helped folks understand when to pick one or the other for a new project. I was coding in Mike’s group, helping folks that got stuck.  I also modified the sample so that much of the middle-tier logic used LINQ style syntax rather than the classic imperative style. Later, Mike and I collaborated on an update to a Windows Forms applications that was multithreaded to give folks an idea on how to use multi-threaded concepts in WPF.

Meanwhile, Dianne Marsh was working with a different group building some of the Code Kata problems in Scala.

All in all, we all learned quite a bit about how to apply skills used in one environment to another.  Many of the attendees were stretched to apply what they know to new environments. We were all stretched to explain these new environments in a way that would resonate with people coming from a very different perspective.

We’ll definitely do more of these in the future.  It was a great way to get information in front of a group of developers and understand the challenges many developers face in adopting new technologies in their current environment. That makes in incumbent upon all of us to do a better job of explaining the value proposition of the latest advances in software development.