I Know an Enterprise Architect who likes Beer

01 Sep 2020

I knew it was only a matter of time before it would happen, and although I’m still trying to figure out how to go about it in the best way as I get more & more involved, I’ve honestly been really excited for this to happen. This hasn’t happened for me in a very long time.

Despite the fact that the only people actually reading my blog posts are the two of you, Micah & Dad, I’ve still been vague when referring to either of you and have refrained from writing either of your names–with some exception. I’m not sure why entirely, but I guess that’s what I’m trying to figure out. Today, I tested the Baton Rouge waters.

For the past few weeks, i’ve been searching for local networking within the industry. I’d like to gain an understanding of the industry in Baton Rouge (i think it’s a lot bigger than I know), and it can’t hurt to know some locals in the same field.

A couple weeks ago I reached out to the leader of the Geaux Agile Baton Rouge MeetUp group. Unfortunately, they are not meeting right now–covid…

Today I checked to see if he’d written me a message back. He hadn’t. I glanced at the members of the group, when I saw a familiar face! I met this guy on the second day I lived in Baton Rouge, and any time I see him, I can never remember his name, so it was no surprise to me that today was no different. Needless to say, i figured out his name [again] within my homebrew club page on facebook. I sent him a message about the meetup group, and he got back to me immediately.

He is an Enterprise Architect at BCBS. I mentioned to him what I was upto–training under my “brother & dad”, and he asked me what kind of development my dad & brother do. I took a moment to think on how to respond for surprisingly 2 reasons. First, i realized that I actually wasn’t sure of the answer to that question… Second, i pondered if now was a good time to test these BTR waters. I mentioned Clean Coders and that my dad primarily teaches & writes books–still keeping it vague. Then I decided that this is someone I’ve known for years, so this is the time to test the waters. I continued my message to mention Agile Software Development. Then I changed the subject with two longer messages.

He ignored those. His next comment was “wait wait wait. Your dad is Uncle Bob Martin?” He mentioned that he’s watched some videos and the books that he’s read (all of them), and then says “You know he’s famous in this space right?” I played a little dumb, or humble perhaps, and told him i wasn’t sure how much of the industry in BTR knew who he was. He said “Not all developers know who your dad is around here, but if they do, it means they have a much higher chance of getting hired.” I laughed at that and told him I’d pass the message along.

Then he started using industry terminology that I’ve yet to make myself familiar with–i couldn’t tell him i didn’t know what he was talking about. What kind of a standard would i be upholding?! That’s when I realized that maybe this is why I’ve been contemplating a more reserved entrance into the industry with regard to where i come from.

More on dad later. I’ll write about my first experience of being the daughter of a celebrity in a future post. That was a fun one!

OK, so what did i do today? I got to sit in on the CC’s morning meeting and meet Tad & Nick. That was fun. It was cool to hear the name of a business I recognized and have dealt with in my former life. I need to ask more about that.

Then I spent a while messing with multimethods and decoupling ttt still in order to get the tests to not print the gui while still having the gui print when the app is running. I also worked on testing user inputs, and in doing this looked into memory streams. I’m not sure i get these quite yet, but i’ll keep at it.

Then i worked on my bowling kata. This required messing around with iTerm a little more to understand its functionality as well as looking at something called vim, which i think is just a little quib to do stuff in iTerm without the mouse? I’m not sure yet, so far, i can’t get it to do much of anything except quit, type stuff in the wrong place, and yell at me.

I’m going to switch this around tomorrow and watch the CC video on D, then work on the bowling kata first, then my D presentation, and finally ttt in the end. When i start with ttt, i tend to get pulled into it and can’t find my way out until i must stop, so I’m going to switch it up to help my time management a little bit.