On Saturday, I went to the Oklahoma City Code Camp. This was the first event in OKC and despite some speakers that canceled at the last minute I found the content to be very compelling. The logistics were flawless, right down to the breaks between each session. I tip my hat to Ray and his crew – they did a top notch job making the event fun and informative.

The first presentation was by Jason Zander on the .NET Framework and Silverlight. This was a standard demo package from Microsoft and included a lot of things I had seen in previous meetings.

The second session was on Behavior Driven Design by Scott Bellware. Kudos to Scott for pimping a sweet MacBook Pro (2.4 Ghz, 4 GB, VMware Fusion) with a Speck hard case. Favorite quote, “How do I right-click on this thing?” The content was great, and I felt the importance of TDD in the design process.

Lunch was pizza, always a staple!

After lunch, the format was mixed up a bit. The presentation was to be on Ping Pong Pair Programming, but one of the presenters canceled. So Dave Laribee loosened up the style a bit and gave a demonstration of how user stories we handled in a ping-pong style between a pair of developers. This by far was a great demonstration. It was almost all code and really showed how TDD plays out. They took turns writing a test, and then having the other write the code. It was slick. They even had I think four programmers at the end, each taking turns at the keyboard. It was very exciting – the cooperation and conflict was intense. It was like a productive design session because code was being written!

The next session was on Domain Driven Design using NHibernate. Having recently become familiar with NHibernate, I was anxious to see this topic covered. I found the information both in-depth and easy to follow. A lot of the methods described in this session I already use in my own space.

The final session was a roundtable discussion on Agile development. It was meant to be an open discussion about any topic, but the Agile guys totally dominated the content. Some heated debates took place, and at one point it almost came down to blows – these are some passionate folks! A lot of useful information was given, I just hope I can remember it all.

In the end, I felt the trip was far more worthwhile than I had anticipated. I spent the rest of the evening with some of the speakers to just get a glimpse at what gets them excited. Their dedication to Agile software development is deep in their veins, and it was very interesting to hear their views. The thing I learned the most from Saturday is that I’m a complete neophyte when it comes to Agile development. Using the tools alone does not make you Agile, it takes a major shift in processes as well.