Agile development

I chatted with Kirk Pepperdine at the Grails Exchange in London
about Grails and Agile Development.
If you like to listen, it's
posted here.

Groovy
1.5 was released yesterday! I see a lot of excitement around it. The developer
community has been very active and the user base is increasing by the day.

A few weeks ago, Scott and I sat
down to talk about DSL and while at it, we got a crazy idea to actually do a video
recording as well.

I have been on the road for a few weeks now with very limited internet time and only now I noticed
that my recording on Inevitability
of Dynamic Languages had been posted on .NET Rocks earlier this month.
If you are interested in dynamic languages, you can hear me talk to Carl and Richard
about it there.

I had a good time yesterday at SeaJUG.

The meeting was held at the office of SolutionsIQ.  The evening started with
the kind folks at SolutionsIQ giving me a quick tour of their
development facility where they're practicing agility.

The SeaJUG group had about 20 attendees, some what smaller in size than I had expected.
However, the level of interaction was quite intense. I would any day prefer a group
that is interested, interactive, opinionated, and argumentative, as this group was
than a group that is rather complacent and quiet.

NFJS is sponsoring my
visit to speak at the Seattle JUG.
I will be speaking there about "Groovy for Java Programmers" and "Agile Web Development
with Grails" on Tuesday night.

Some things that you can say eloquently in one (human) language, may not sound
as nice when you translate to another language. Idioms add spice to conversations
in a language
(and when overused they turn into cliches). Idioms don't take the aggregated meaning
of the
words that make them. Their meaning's shaped by culture, tradition, and history.

Idioms make learning a language interesting, tricky, and fun.
One of the challenges of picking up a language is learning the idioms.

I will be speaking at the Miami
Users Group tonight on the topics of Practices of an Agile Developer and Spring
with Groovy.

I was in Miami to speak at the Spring Experience in December and I am glad to be back
this time to speak at the users group,

thanks to NFJS for sponsoring
my visit.

Check
this out if you're interested in Groovy and Grails. Scott and I talk about what
these are, how to use 'em, and why?

NFJS is sponsoring
my visit to the Denver JUG on
Wednesday and Boulder JUG on
Thursday.

I look forward to a ZePo (Zero Powerpoint) presentation on two topics—Testing Spring
Applications

and Using Groovy in Spring.