I’m pleased to announce that Clinton Begin, the Java persistence expert and the creator of iBATIS, has joined our team at WellGood, LLC. Many of you may have seen the lively discussions between us in places like the [NFJS Expert Panel](http://nofluffjuststuff.com), and the [InfoQ discussion boards](http://www.infoq.com/articles/From-Java-to-Ruby—Strategies). You might be asking yourself what we could possibly have in common. More than you think, as it turns out. Let me briefly digress.
A couple of weeks ago, waves of storms were pounding Austin. We enjoyed the spectacular intimidating light show from my back deck, and we watched the weather forecast each evening as the lake behind us rose foot by foot in the nightly lake forecast. The Cyprus Creek “bike path” was rapidly turning into a real lake again, rising over 10 feet in a few short days, so we loved to celebrate the rising lake levels. But the rest of the forecast was useless. The weathermen just couldn’t find a pattern in the madness. Their tools and models did not give them the information they needed to do their job. They seriously missed the timing of the storms by days. At one moment of frustration, the weatherman said he was “now casting”. The image of the weather man peeking his head out of the back door and then coming inside and saying “It’s raining” just cracked me up.
But in some ways, I was “now casting” on the job. I was making decisions without a complete stack of information. I’d asume that after a major build, my team would always run test cases locally. I was sure every developer never made a mistake when choosing what files to commit. When Clinton came in, the fist thing he did was to install a continuous integration server, and take a pass through our tests to make sure they were telling us what we needed to know. Now, we’ve always been pretty good about running our test suites and measuring coverage, but the CI server has saved our bacon many times since Clinton installed it.
Understand that Clinton is much more than an agility expert. He’s an extraordinary programmer. How could a Java guy fit so well on a Ruby team? It’s simple. To Clinton, the language doesn’t matter as much as the problem at hand. He knows how to communicate to his peers in his code, and to his customers in their business terms, and he understands what it takes to build things right the first time.
Hello, Mr. Begin. And Goodbye, now-casting.