I started the third day of my journeyman tour on a beautiful drive through rural Ohio on my way to NimblePros. In fact, it was so beautiful, we decided to stop and explore for a few minutes.
At NimblePros, I paired with Todd Ropog on some troublesome jQuery code they were attempting to stitch into their .NET MVC app. Despite the fact that NimblePros is in rural Ohio (at least it felt rural to this city-boy) and is mainly a .NET shop, I was struck by the similarities they share with shops like Obtiva. I suppose you could call these sorts of businesses post-agile, a whole generation of development shops that take agile principles for granted and naturally organize their workplaces for pair programming and maximizing collaboration. NimblePros is in the process of building out a sweet new workspace. Here's their main workspace currently:
Around midday, Ricky and I headed north to Cleveland to spend the rest of the day at LeanDog. I really connected with these people and the atmosphere on the boat. Joe Fiorini showed us around Cleveland a bit, and led us to the delicious West Side Market. Later, I spent some time pairing with Joel Helbling, which was great fun.
The boat has a great vibe that I caught onto as the day went on, especially as more people started showing up. Friends like Doc "Logic" Norton. And even older friends like Joseph Leddy. John Stahl gave Ricky and me a tour of the boat and shared what he's planning in terms of remodeling. It's going to be awesome when they're through with it.
The night concluded with a merged Cleveland Agile and Ruby user group meeting where I espoused the virtues of mentoring, apprenticeships, finding your life's work, and a potpourri of other psycho-social-software-related topics that I've been noodling on. I felt scattered, but judging from the amount of questions afterward, people stuck with me. The conversations afterward were extremely encouraging. Cleveland has a great developer community. It's no surprise that Corey launched his first tour from here.
I'll post the video of the talk as soon as it's available.
