August 2002 meeting
[Those who remember the other topics we discussed, please add them.]
This was our first meeting since March except for the "split meeting" during the summer (where BrianDorsey and MikeOrr ended up at Tully's and talked databases, and ? ended up at the International Fountain in Seattle Center).
We met at Aviarc in Fremont in August. There were around twelve including SteveHowell who had moved to South Carolina (and is now in DC) and three Perl guys he brought with him. One of them was BrianIngerson ("Ingy") who's moving to Portland and is the author of YAML http://www.yaml.org/, a simple data serialization format that can replace XML in some cases. Steve is writing a Python YAML parser and has already published a first draft][[http://www.yaml.org/download.html]. Steve also wrote a Python YAML emitter][[http://www.seapig.org/PythonYamlEmitter].
We decided to meet the first Monday of every month at Aviarc, unless somebody suggests another place we can also consider for long term that we want to try out.
Afterwards, AdamFeuer who works at Aviarc showed us how the company strongly applies their ExtremeProgramming and PairProgramming principles. Every morning they have a meeting in front of their bulletin board of note cards (in columns of most urgent to least urgent tasks, questions, or user-desired UI specifications) to discuss what to do that day, and they never write any code unless two people write it together, and they run test suites before, during and after writing anything. After that, we went to the Red Door pub.