Jake Scruggs

What a nice conference! Emphasis on nice. First Joel Adams, chair of Computer science at Calvin College, got up and welcomed us. Calvin College is where GLSEC was held and it looks so shiny and new I wondered if it had just been constructed. I stayed in a room the was about 200 feet from where I gave my talk. Then the mayor of Grand Rapids, George Heartwell, gave us software dudes a nice little welcome speech. He implored us to see downtown Grand Rapids and then talked a lot about jobs and growth. I know Michigan has had hard times, but from the looks of the airport and Calvin College (which is about as scientific a survey as it gets) Grand Rapids must be a city on the grooooow. The opening Keynote was given by Michael Cloran who is the the CEO of Interactions. He started off with a live demo of the "Service Factory." He spoke, through his phone, to a computer and it parsed his voice and answered his questions. It was scary impressive. Typical line from the extended ...

Flew in on election night for the Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference . I'll be giving my metrics talk tomorrow and then I'm off to Orlando, FL to give that talk at Ruby Conf . GLSEC is more of an XP/Agile/Process conference and I'm excited to be attending. The last time I was at a similar conference was XP/AU (Extreme Programming/Agile Universe) in 2004 when I was an apprentice at Object Mentor . I was just about to go back to my job as a high school physics teacher, but I did have an application in at ThoughtWorks. Ah, memories.