Ten Percent and growing...

03/18/2003

I just received an advertisement for this year’s JAOO conference, billed as the Premier European conference on Java™ and Object-Oriented Programming (hence the name) and other software development technologies.

Out of the 30 topic areas listed in the ad, The Pragmatic Programmers (Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas) invented one topic and were instrumental in two others—for a total of 10% of the topics:

Pragmatic Programming: We invented it, and continue to lecture, write, and generate courses for it.

The Ruby Programming Language: Invented by Matz, we wrote the first English-language reference book and have been instrumental in bringing Ruby to the attention of developers throughout the world. Dave has been especially active in the Ruby community, and both Dave and I continue to write articles on Ruby and use it in our practice.

The Agile Alliance: We are 2 of the 17 founding authors of the Agile alliance, and have tried to infuse many of the sometimes over-zealous advocates of agile development with our own brand of pragmatism.

It’s just one conference, of course, and there are plenty of other topics in the world of software development worthy of debate, but it’s kind of fun to consider the prospect of “ten-percent today, tomorrow the world.” :-)