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.
A healthy dose of skepticism (not pessimism) is certainly needed. It helps us understand the pros and cons of solutions and helps us get realistic about our expectations. It also helps us not to get complacent and pushes us to do better in improving things. We have been, as software developers, skeptic about various things. For example, remember the days when we questioned if OO was right and if it would succumb to degrading performance. We doubted Java, the language and the platform. We have doubted dynamic typing and dynamic languages for even much longer. All these are good because it helps us, as a community, to devise methods, tools, techniques, and ways we can improve and be productive.
Until we eventually got thrown out around 9:15PM, we discussed more Groovy and a some Grails. After the meeting, six of us went to a near by restaurant and discussed more of this until 11PM. Overall, it was fun talking to developers who care about their craft. I look forward to meeting a number of them again at the NFJS show in September.
