Location: Kansas City, MO – USA
“I don’t know if I want to go to New York. They’ll have to pay me a lot more because I like it here in Kansas City.” –Roger Maris
The second annual Kansas City Developer’s Conference (KCDC) will be held this Saturday, June 19th, and Typemock is proud to be a part of it. Last year’s conference pulled in attendees from as far away as Tulsa, Des Moines, Omaha, St. Louis and Denver and attendance is expected to double this year. We caught up with Lee Brandt, one of its organizers, to discuss car mechanics, the development culture in Kansas City, BDD passion, KCDC 2010 highlights, side projects and even Monty Python.
TM: Tell us about your journey from car mechanic to KCDC organizer.
LB: In another life, I worked on cars for a living. Moved my way to machinist and fell in love with programming the computers for milling machines. That eventually led me to pursue programming professionally. A few years ago I went to a user group meeting and really enjoyed it. I started speaking at the group, and was always complaining about the lack of developer events available in Kansas City, so the leaders of the group put me on the leadership team to run events. Now, I help run the user group meetings and the events. I really enjoy sharing what I know and learning what others know. Keeps me from having to make all the mistakes myself.
TM: What’s the development culture like in the Kansas City area?
LB: Kansas City has some great developers and it is a very tight-knit community. Like much of the country, Kansas City is seeing a real shift toward Agile development and project management practices. There is a vibrant community of developers from all platforms: .Net, Ruby, Java and others, and they don’t mind sharing ideas and practices. We also have an annual Coders4Charities event where 40-50 developers give up an entire weekend to develop software for charities that otherwise could not afford it. It really is the epitome of Kansas City developers.
TM: Which technologies interest you most and why?
LB: Behavior-Driven Development is a passion of mine. I’m getting better with it all the time and it has drastically improved the quality of my code. I also love architectural patterns: MVC, MVP, MVVM. These are cornerstones for making applications more extensible, maintainable and testable. Finally, I am a freak for Agile techniques. I have been doing Kanban for a couple of years now from Scrum & XP before that and I just can’t go back to running a software project any other way now.
TM: Which topics are you looking forward to learning more about at KCDC 2010?
LB: I really wish we had the funds to video all the talks and make them available online, cause I want to see all of them. I am most excited to learn about JSSpec (Philip Japikse), Techniques for testing legacy apps (Russell Ball), Topshelf (A tool for quickly spinning up Windows services) (Dru Sellers) and RoundHouse (a database migration tool) (Rob Reynolds).
TM: Any interesting side projects to promote?
LB: My company, AdventureTech, has been giving free Lunch & Learn sessions at the local community college about Lean software. We are all about educating. We’ve had demonstrable success with Kanban and are very excited to share those successes with other people.
TM: What…is your favorite color?
LB: #336699
TM: What…is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
LB: African or European swallow?
Typemock is proud to sponsor KCDC 2010 and will be raffling two Typemock Isolator licenses at the event plus a special offer for all its attendees. Isolator 2010 not only supports Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 but also earlier versions.
If you would like to know more about how Typemock Isolator makes unit testing so easy, or if you have an event you would like us to sponsor please email us at racheli [at] typemock [dot] com and let’s chat about it.
-Britt King
