A couple of years ago I participated to a very interesting summit for .NET architects in the Microsoft Campus in Redmond.

At that time the PAG group just started to deliver a couple of application blocks and the idea of developing a pattern-aware .NET community was at its infancy.

Personally, I felt that the community was (and still is), by a large degree, almost totally unaware of even the most basic design patterns. That was in shear contrast with the Java world, where every solution to recurring problems was identified, shared, evaluated, catalogued and then framed as either a pattern or an anti-pattern. If you followed the “PetShop war” or you checked theserverside.com and looked at the quality of the posts you would know what I mean.

Anyways, in that occasion, I personally met Gregor Hohpe from ThoughtWorks. Gregor had just finished co-writing the book ”Enterprise Solution Patterns Using Microsoft .NET” and I had the opportunity (like many others) to have a look at his manuscript just days before its release.

As we obviously shared a passion for patterns and architectures, we talked about things that we both liked and briefly shared some experiences.
I was really curious to know how he developed the necessary skills to be able to write such a book. With modesty, he said he was lucky because he had an early involvement in a group of very smart and influential people. Additionally, a lot of those patterns where adapted from existing implementations, mostly in the Java platform, on which he had a strong background.

When I asked Gregor what kind of methodologies he uses to develop enterprise applications, he told me something that was going to transform my career forever: he was an agile developer.

WHAT????? I was really shocked. How could that be possible? With all my ignorance, I thought that agile methodologies such as Extreme Programming were yet another RAD fad, an excuse to masquerade hacked development shortcuts with more or less indifference for consolidated design practices.

Evidently, I was wrong.

So, I questioned my beliefs and embraced change.
Two years later, I’m sitting here and writing my first post ever.
My mission is to share my personal and professional transformations with you.