In the summer of 2009 I revisited my 2004 summer apprenticeship at Object Mentor. What follows is the original 2004 post and then some 2009 commentary.

Travel day today. Flew to Phoenix, AZ (4 hours) and then to Calgary (3 hours) plus 1 hour for lateness and layovers is an 8 hour trip that should have taken 3 (Chi to Cal). And there was a fun little dash from gate A11 to B7 (which are much farther apart than you might guess using your knowledge of the alphabet) because my first flight landed late.

Check in at the Hyatt Regency was easy and gorgeous. The conference space is really nice too. Micah, Paul, David, James, Justin (Micah’s younger brother), Bob, and I spent some of Saturday night setting up the ‘XP for a Day’ Tutorial space. There’s gonna be 3 teams of 4 (2 pairs each) working on ‘Hunt the Wumpus.’ So we needed to link all the computers up, set up FitNesse, and get CVS working. James has been nice enough to let me sit in on the tutorial, so I’m excited to see how much functionality we can add to ‘Hunt the Wumpus.’ Which is an old text-based game from the late 70s early 80s. You walk around a cave trying to shoot the Wumpus with an arrow. But if you go into to room with the Wumpus, he eats you. And there’s pits to kill you and bats to randomly transport you. Some functionality has already been done, so we’re going keep the project going.

Later we ate at the James Joyce bar and Bob talked about almost killing himself with carbon tetra chloride, high voltage transformers, and all sorts of other experiments he did when a child. I told some physics teacher stories. Ron Jeffries talked about the perils of rainwater management. We tried to get David to do some magic tricks (he was a magician in another life) but he politely declined.

Yeah, it was a pretty heady atmosphere at the eXtreme Programing Agile United conference. Bob knows everyone in the community so hanging out with him means you get to make a fool of yourself in front of some heavyweights. Ron Jeffries was tons of fun chat with – that guy has some stories to tell and man can he tell em’.