The evening of September 22nd marked the kick off for the 2009 season of XP West Michigan. We were very happy to host Doug Bradbury from the company 8th Light, a noted Chicago-area agile software development firm. Doug’s topic was titled “Software Craftsmanship: Raising the Bar of Professional Software Development”.

In his presentation, Doug argued that creating software bears more in common with a craft such as carpentry than with the work that civil engineers do, shedding the common misnomer of the idea of a “software engineer”. Software is a craft in that we work with our hands (and keyboards) directly with the raw material of our art (code). Developers craft a product directly, rather than making a design or blueprints like an architect.

One of the aspects of a craft is that it is more than just having some knowledge and theorems: it’s a matter of being well practiced and skilled. Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers: The Story of Success, tells us that empirically it seems to take about 10,000 hours for someone to become good at something. Watch this short video to hear Gladwell expand on his idea here.

XP West Michigan is just getting started and we’ve got a great year planned. Remember that you can always see the latest schedule on the XP West Michigan web site.

See you all next month for Jon Wettersten’s presentation “Creative Process as Seen Through Creative Language”. Jon is a senior application developer and design strategist for IDEO, a mulit-national design consultancy.

If you’re interested in software craftsmanship, consider joining the mailing list.

Edit 9/27 One of our members, Jerry Van Baren, pointed me to this link describing a process where a group of craftsman built a fully custom car from the ground up. It’s a good example of craftsmanship: no education or schooling will give you the ability to pound out the aluminum body by hand as they did – it takes practice and experience. Software is the same way – understanding the principles is a necessary foundation, but you need practice and experience to build complex systems.

On September 22nd, Atomic Object co-founder and president Carl Erickson will be the guest speaker at the Lakeshore Advantage e2e Series. Erickson, who served as a professor of computer science at GVSU for 10 years prior to founding Atomic Object in 2001 will be presenting "When a professor has to start a company: the story of Atomic Object."

Since its 2001 inception, Atomic Object has continued to grow. Posting a consistent yearly revenue growth, and now employing 24 full-time employees, Atomic Object serves as a model for software startups. By focusing on maintaining a diverse clientele, quality, and the needs of customers, Atomic Object has achieved success and earned a national reputation for excellence.



The e2e Series, which stands for "entrepreneur to entrepreneur", focuses on connecting business leaders of today with the entrepreneurs of tomorrow. Erickson's story and success will undoubtedly inspire and motivate his audience, comprised largely of young professionals, to take a bold step of their own.

The free event starts at 5:30PM (refreshments provided) and is hosted courtesy of Lakeshore Advantage, a full service startup incubator. For more information, please refer to the event website.

The Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference is coming up fast! Scheduled for November 16th and 17th, the GLSEC conference, an XP West Michigan event, focuses on agile software practices. The emphasis of the conference is centered on the art of software craftsmanship, and delivering outstanding, fully tested software packages. Past years have received enthusiastic reviews, and we are certain that the third year will be no exception.



The conference's theme for this year is "Compete Globally, Act Locally". GLSEC will explore how small boutique software firms in West Michigan can deliver high-quality, globally competitive end products. Some of this year's topics will include:

• Good Communication without Saying a Word
  
• Eggs, Beef, and Agile. What Does 'Grade' Have to do With Project Quality?
  
• Improving our Craft: A Discussion on Software Estimation
  
• What's the Right Level of Testing?
  
• JCI Experience Report: Using Agile Methods to Deploy Useful Processes

...and many more. A complete listing of speakers, tutorials and topics can be found at the GLSEC homepage. This year's enriching opening keynote will be Dorothy Graham, internationally recognized for her expertise in software testing.

The closing keynote will be a Lincoln/Douglas style debate session between longtime friends and expert software craftsmen David Crosby of Atomic Object and Paul Jorgensen of GVSU, which will undoubtedly provide great insight and some good-natured banter. As in past years, we know that participants will find this conference to be not only outstanding, but valuable to their craft as well.

Registration is now open, with a discount on early registration valid until September 30th.

Pomegranate Studios, the masterminds behind the international ArtPrize contest, worked closely with Atomic Object to develop an application to let voters use their iPhone to participate in the event.

ArtPrize is a radically open competition where the winner is decided by public voting. Starting on September 23rd, the contest will run for two weeks with the final winner announced on October 8th.



The ArtPrize app allows users to locate artists' installations throughout downtown Grand Rapids, utilizing Google Maps on the iPhone. Once you've registered to vote, you can easily vote for your favorite artists using the app. The app also encourages users to engage with others via Facebook and Twitter, allowing audiences to express their opinions and observations in real-time. Mlive, a statewide Michigan news site, praised the ArtPrize app for its usefulness--particularly for the ability to preview artists' works and locate venues.

Atomic Object is pleased to be a part of something so creative, innovative and beneficial for the community of Grand Rapids.

The ArtPrize app is available the App Store now. Click the button below to see it in iTunes or just search for "artprize" on your iPhone.

About a year ago, we launched our first Twitter application, Uladoo. A collaboration between Dave Christiansen and Atomic Object, Uladoo is designed to "chart your life", allowing users to create a chart for anything they may want to keep track of. Users have charted cookies baked to blog-posts written.

Uladoo was developed keeping in mind the extreme simplicty of Twitter. Users need only to tweet a value to @uladoo to create a new chart. This low barrier, no sign-up setup makes Uladoo inviting, encouraging new users to try out the application without commitment or hassle. Users can create as many charts as they want, and are able to tweet values to any chart simply by referencing the name of the chart in their tweet.



Since its inception as an extremely simple interface, Uladoo has undergone some new features that allow Uladoo'ers to share their charts via Facebook and HTML embedding, while still maintaining the application's original simplicity.

When Uladoo was launched, the idea was not to dictate or direct users how they should use the service. Rather, the developers chose to let users determine how the service should be used. It's interesting to see how users have adopted and utilized Uladoo. Some of the more creative and unique charts on Uladoo are:

• Pages Written , from c_bass, Germany
• Pop Expenses , from ryanfogle, Michigan, USA
• Glasses of Water, from DugaldWilson, North Carolina, USA
• Windows XP Reboots , from catenate, Iran
• Coughs (I'm Sick) , from trentcarlyle, Colorado, USA
• Tweeple Following Me, from sarach, Washington, USA

Anything that can benefit from a simple line graph is perfect for Uladoo. We are excited to see how users continue to find creative ways to make Uladoo valuable to their lives. What will you be charting?