I now work for the Emerging Solutions group of BJC HealthCare. So far I’m loving it. I’ve been reunited with a couple of colleagues: Pat, who I worked with at MetaMatrix, and Paul who I worked with at Monsanto. My timing was fortunate: my first real work is to be on a team that is kicking off a new, large web portal. Technology includes Spring (MVC, Web Flow, Security), Hibernate, Velocity, Maven, CVS, web services. Development tools are Eclipse, the Atlassian tools (Bamboo, FishEye, Crucible, Jira, Confluence), GreenHopper (a Jira plugin giving a Scrum-centric view). We do scrum and even have two certified ScrumMasters.

Another colleague, Ryan Senior, has started within ES a shadowy secret cabal known as the Dead Coders Society. The group meets informally for an hour every few weeks and discusses some technology, book, or whatnot. We met this week, it was my second meeting; the group has just finished up Bob Martin’s Clean Code and then we voted on what to do next. We ultimately decided to read Guy Steele’s two Lambda Papers in preparation for tackling Real World Haskell.

Which segues nicely into the Lambda Lounge. This local functional and dynamic languages interest group has given me, and many others, the language itch. I believe Ryan (another regular) got the idea from λL to propose both the lambda papers and Real World Haskell. There has already been one Haskell presentation, and there are two more scheduled. I’ll be presenting on the Fan programming language in July. Fan is considerably less mind-bending for a Java programmer than something like Haskell, but nonetheless it is an enjoyable learning experience and I’m looking forward to presenting. I also implemented a Fan vending machine for the language shootout last month.

In other news, earlier this year I released a new version of my church’s website which I built using WordPress. It’s central feature is essentially a podcast of the audio of each sermon. I’d like to blog more about this in great deal, I learned quite a bit in the process. While I’m happy with the result – it is a quantum leap beyond the old site – I’ve already got a long mental list of improvements. First up – refactor away a lot of hardcoded behavior and, if possible, find or make WordPress plugins instead.

By the way, as I publish this I am sitting in the audience of the St. Louis Java User’s Group, watching Matt Taylor present about Groovy and Test Driven Development. He is writing an application from scratch live on stage using Groovy and TDD.