Meanwhile, big customers knocked at the door, sales are already very encouraging, so Roman and me decided to move on and start building a real team. Britt King joined in September and helps building a community around PostSharp. This month we opened a commercial office in United States (more blogging soon), so sales to North America should go much smoother than before.
Our next task is to build a development team, and since PostSharp is so abstract inside, we can afford only the best software craftsmen - and will hire internationally. More soon, but if being paid to work on a product as PostSharp seems the dream job to you, don’t hesitate and drop me a mail :).
Trip to London
Today Britt and I are heading to London. The primary objective of the trip is to attend the European Software Craftsmanship Conference tomorrow, talk with people, meet community leaders, and pick up ideas we can apply to create a community in Prague, or build a company around the values of software craftsmanship. I’ll demonstrate aspect-oriented programming (with PostSharp, of course) with live coding.
Today we’ll attend the first meeting of the London Software Craftsmanship Community (located at Skills Matter’s office) with the same objective of trying to grasp what we really want software craftsmanship to mean, and how to turn an ideal into a working community.
After the formal meeting, we’ll continue the evening in a pub (The Slaughtered Lamb), where folks of the London .NET User Group will join. We’ll discuss and share experience about aspect-oriented programming.
We want to interview a couple of people about software craftsmanship and/or aspect-oriented programming, including Sandro Mancuso, Zi Makki, Ben Hall, Jason Gorman, and Richard Fennel. We’ll try to record the discussions with a camcorder and upload the good minutes online.
Initiating the Discussion
Software craftsmanship has become so fashionable that it’s being misused and abused. I think we face the risk that this term becomes empty if we don’t do some effort to define it. So the question we have to address now is: what does it mean for us to be a software craftsman, and what it does not mean. Here’s a list of questions to which we’ll seek answers during this trip.
- Why should a software developer aspire to be software craftsman?
- What does software craftsmanship mean for you? What it does not mean?
- How are you producing well-crafted software?
- What obstacles prevent you from achieving this ideal of software craftsmanship?
- Personal experience of overcoming challenges?
- Can languages and tools help us to produce well-crafted software
- How can we as a community improve programming languages and tools ?
- How can we as fellow craftsmen raise the bar?
We’ll interview people and upload the recording. But let’s start a larger discussion: what does software craftsmanship mean to you?
Happy crafting!
-gael