I'm probably going to head out tomorrow morning at about 3:00am which will put me in Knoxville about 7:30am after losing the hour. I would head over tonight but I don't want to lose the evening with the fam.

Still not sure but so far I have the following agenda:

See y'all there!

I'm planning to attend the September Agile Boot Camp for .NET. I want to make the most of my time there so I've started to make sure I'm functionally familiar with as much of the real world issues that are covered during the 3-day course as possible. To that end, I wanted to make sure I'm brushing up on the right stuff. Other than the issues mentioned at the official site, there's been a few blog posts that mentions some of the specific tools and methodologies:

• Jeffery Palermo himself on the July camp
• Karthik Hariharan's thoughts on the camp
• Michael Palermo's post
• Lee Brandt's post

Here's the list of tools/principles/practices/etc. from what I can gather along with my #1 link for getting up to speed:

• Domain Driven Design (DDD) - Don't really have a "best link" for this as I'm trying to weigh DDD and BDD right now so I'm not yet "there"
• Test-Driven Development (TDD) - Evan Hoff's Screencast is awesome for a quick "101"
• Onion Architecture - Jeffery Palermo coined the term and hence explains it best
• Inversion of Control (IoC / DI) - Got schooled at DNR from James Kovacs 
• Resharper - James Kovacs has a great guide on becoming a R# Ninja and watching Evan Hoff mentioned above helped too
• Subversion - There's plenty of 101's but this guide taught me about branching
• Pair programming - There's a great breakdown of Pair programming in Chapter 6 of Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
• Refactoring - Again, Agile PPP in C# has a great explanation in Chapter 5
• Build Automation with NAnt and CCNet - Code Leader has some great information about setting up a Build Server
• Object-relational mapping with NHibernate - Summer of NHibernate screencasts helped me get up to speed best
• Automated unit and Integration testing - other than at the Build Server level, TestDriven.NET helped me with this but I'm not sure if that's what they mean here
• Interfaced-based programming - "getting this" was a combination of things but watching ASP.NET MVC Storefront screencasts and in particular #1 and his talk with Ayende really helped bring this home for me
• Team dynamics - not really sure what this covers
• Automated deployments - not really sure about this either
• Redgate SQL Compare - I've used this before but I suspect Jeffery is advocating specific usage
• SQL Profiler - not really sure what/where to get information on this specifically as it relates to the ABC
• Rhino Mocks - I'm still trying to "get it", I know what it's for, I know how to use it but I'm sure I need to take it to the next level 
• Separation of Concerns - don't really have a "best link" for this one, it's a pretty simple concept to grasp
• Design patterns - this is another area where the Agile PPP in C# book had some really good practical info

I've used or looked at a lot of the tools/methodologies mentioned above before but I decided to take a completely fresh look at all of them and it has been very enlightening as well as motivational (i.e. the more I learned the more I learned I need to learn more).

Are there any others? Is this list current? Should ASP.NET MVC be included in the list now? Palermo's writing what I'm sure will be an excellent book on ASP.NET MVC so I assume so but I know past camps have used MVP (as in Model View Presenter).

NUnit or MbUnit? (I'm pretty sure it's NUnit at the camp). StructureMap, ActiveRecord, NCover, NDepend, NTrouble ??? (ok, I made that last one up)

I just had a REALLY freaky thing happen... I'm just gonna post about it, as it happened, and you decide.

Let's rewind an hour ago.

It's 1:00AM and I'm thinking about heading off to bed but I remember I was planning on taking my "library" of current books back to my office. I decide I better do it now because I'll forget in the morning. I grab a huge stack from my home office and head to my car. On the way downstairs I remember a stash of books I haven't gotten to since buying at TechEd 2007 that are in the garage. I find the stash and put them with the rest and then I find yet another stash of books I bought after TechEd because I was so hyped on getting productive. Among this stash is one book in particular that I had forgotten all about. I'd read the first chapter, liked it, but got distracted. I carry it with me back upstairs and set it on the desk in front of me. I'm intent on wrapping up things and heading to bed when twhirl pops up with this:

I click the link (did I mention I'm easily distracted) and find myself at Jeffery Palermo's Links for today.

In that list of links I see a link titled Chicken Dance tagged "agile boot". Since I'm hoping to attend Jeffery Palermo's Agile Boot Camp week after next, I visit the link. While reading Michael Palermo's (no relation I don't think) post about Jott.com he mentions GTD. The acronym just isn't ringing for me (it IS about 2AM after all) so I click _that_ link (can you say bunny trail).

Which leads me to his post about the book, Getting Things Done by David Allen. Now the acronym rings a bell and so does the picture I'm looking at on my screen:

It just also happens to be what I see when I glance down at the book in front of me that I bought over a year ago that has been stuck away in my garage, forgotten, until about an hour ago...

"You know what's funny? My pickle started out in a jar, and now it's in one again! It's like a pun or something" - Patrick Star, SpongeBob SquarePants

Omen? Sign? Freaky? I think it's all 3 myself and I'm going to read the book cover to cover tomorrow just in case!

This is my first blog post so I thought I would give a quick post about who I am and why I'm starting this blog.

Who Am I?

For those who don't know me, I'm a computer programmer in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm also husband to Tammy and father to 5-yr-old Connor and 20-month-old Chandler. I work for Nashville Wraps, a gift packaging company.

Who Am I? Who Am I? I am the Walrus. - Brian, The Breakfast Club

I met my wife for the first time in 6th grade. We never dated in school but knew of each other. It turned out that I was on our high school reunion committee and while calling classmates for our 10-year, I came across her name. She said she wasn't planning to attend and I moved on down the list of names. The day of, in fact, mere hours before, I get a call from her and she said she'd changed her mind. She started asking me place, time, etc. and so I said, "why don't I just come pick you up" (yes, I had ulterior motives, Tammy has always been a looker). She sounded hesitant but agreed. To make a long story short, when I dropped her off that night I asked if I could see her again and we started dating that next week. A month later I was sitting at lunch with her mother asking for her hand in marriage. I waited another two months so everyone wouldn't think I was rash, and gave Tammy (and myself) quite a shock and popped the question. The rest, as they say, is history.

I got my current job at Nashville Wraps while running an Internet game center, YourGame.Net. The owner, Robby Meadows, and his son, James Meadows came to YGN to play games. James got wind that they needed someone to make their website take orders. He suggested me to the IT Director, Glen Batson, and the next thing I know, I'm writing an ECommerce system for Wraps. Has it been over eight years ago now, wow.

The reason I'm starting this blog is mainly so people will stop asking me, "you're a web guy, why don't you have a blog". Also, I've just spent the better part of a year re-learning most everything I knew about programming. I've read more books in the last year than any other period in my life and that's quite a bit. I am _really_ excited about what's going on in my industry and I wanted a place to record my thoughts and perhaps even get some feedback too.

My current passion is ASP.NET MVC and how it allows Agile practices with ASP.NET. I intend to post on that very soon.