Despite living pretty close to Cambridge I’ve never actually worked there. For the past 25 years I’ve commuted to London because it was easier and faster than getting to Cambridge [1]. The daily rates for contract programmers in the finance industry might also have had an influence too :o).
Anyway, one consequence of working in London meant that I had access to all the London meetups in the evening. But I also had a wife and four young children, so wanted to keep the balance right and consequently I largely limited myself to the ACCU London and eXtreme Tuesday Club (XTC) events, only dabbling in others if there was a particularly interesting talk / topic.
Then the pandemic happened, and like many others I found myself working remotely full-time. I had worked from home before on previous contracts, and in some cases that was to facilitate being able to attend a meetup in Cambridge, most notably around .Net and Go, but I only attended a handful or so. Mark Dalgarno (via Software Acumen – organiser of many Agile related conferences, such as Agile Cambridge) was in Cambridge back then too, and through Software East also arranged various enjoyable gatherings.
Eventually some semblance of normality resumed but I still found myself working remotely and now Cambridge was my nearest point of social contact (IT wise) in the evenings. The pandemic meant that meetups had to stop for some considerable time (years!) and with people nervous to venture back out again the choice was naturally limited. Platform focused meetups like Cambridge .Net reappeared in-person sooner, as I guess they had a captive audience, but I wanted something that covered the wider topic of programming at large, not just one specific language / stack. (There was an ACCU Cambridge meetup once-upon-a-time but sadly that folded a long time ago.)
Tangentially, my eldest son had also recently entered a career in programming and he asked me about any local meetups I knew of as he was based around the same area. It didn’t take long to discover that the Cambridge Software Crafters group on Meetup was holding its first in-person gathering since November 2019 (a hiatus of four years). The topic was learning TDD and it was being held in the office where my son was working at the time so I suggested he had no excuse not to attend either :o).
I met some old faces at that event and, more importantly, some new faces too. (I even bumped into a young chap who lived a few houses down my street. I didn’t know he’d also started a career as a programmer.) A diversity of ages, experience, industries, culture, etc. is an important requirement for me in a more general craft-oriented meetup because “one size never fits all” and I like to be aware of what forces and constraints drive other people’s work.
For that first meetup we did a leap-year kata in pairs. I chose to work with someone young who wanted to use TypeScript as I’d never used that before. Having practiced TDD for almost 20 years I clearly wasn’t there as a beginner but I felt my experience might be useful and I always learn something new when pairing with people. (After pairing / mobbing heavily for the 6 years prior to my current contract I realised how much I had missed the sociability of ensemble programming.)
Sadly I missed the next few events but my son kept me informed on what they had got up to and it continued to sound interesting, with practicing TDD clearly a popular topic. I eventually attended the Architecture Kata, which I found interesting and intend to write up some particular observations in a separate post. Then we did an evening of lightning talks (10 mins) which is something I’ve always enjoyed at the ACCU and Python conferences as you always get a pretty diverse set of topics. This was no exception. (It also gave me an opportunity to resurrect a humorous short talk I did at ACCU 2014 – The Art of Code.)
The most recent meetup was another TDD kata, this time around the game of Noughts & Crosses. I ended up pairing with someone that was only just getting into programming and was attending the meetup to learn more about the craft as he had a background in construction. In the end we hardly did any programming per-se and I mostly walked him through TDD but more as a backdrop on talking about what sustainable delivery really entails. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting to do that evening but I was glad I could share some knowledge & experience, and it meant that everybody then got a suitable partner they could work with.
While the sociability factor is high on my list it would be remiss of me not to mention that the event has sponsorship from Codurance which means that the evening comes with free pizza and drinks. The venue, The Bradfield Centre, is a nice modern building and has an auditorium which was used for the lightning talks. Most events take place on the open plan ground floor area as we either pair or work in small groups and then share with everyone what we’ve done / learned.
I really hope this meetup continues to gain traction as I think we often focus too much on specific technologies and not enough on the craft as a whole. There are clearly a few regulars but also new faces each time which provides a nice mix and everyone has been really friendly. It also gives me an opportunity to “talk shop” with my son as that never goes down well at family gatherings :o).
[1] Things are much improved with the guided buses and upgraded A14 but what I wrote in “Missing the Daily Commute by Train” still holds as far as using the train goes.
