TITLE: And Now Starring...
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 10, 2004 11:03 PM
DESC: days 2 and 3 at plop
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BODY:
I was in a skit tonight. I don't think I've had a role in a skit
not created by one of my daughters since 1985 or so, when I teamed
with one of best friends and the cutest girl I went to college with
on a skit in our Business Law class.
The skit was put on by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising to introduce
their forthcoming book,
Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas.
They wrote a short play as a vehicle for presenting a subset of their
pattern language at
XP 2004,
which they reprised here. I had two lines as an Early Adopter, a
careful, judicious decision maker who needs to see concrete results
before adopting a technology, but who is basically open to change.
Wearing a construction paper hat, I pulled off my lines without even
looking at my script. Look for the video at a Mr. Movies near you.
My favorite part of the skit that didn't involve me was
this Dilbert comic
that opened the show.
PLoP
makes you do crazy things.
Our writers' workshop was excellent. Ralph Johnson and I had two
papers on our elementary patterns work at
ChiliPLoP.
They are the first concrete steps toward a CS1 textbook driven by
patterns and an agile approach from the beginning. The papers
were well-received, and we gathered a lot of feedback on what
worked well and what could stand some improvement. Now we're
talking about how to give the writing project a boost of energy.
I'll post links to the papers soon.
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