Talk with Micah Martin

Micah Martin is a founder of 8th Light in Chicago. He hosted me Wednesday night through Friday night (Paul Pagel, also of 8th Light, let me stay at his place on Friday night), leading up to the Software Craftsmanship Summit on Saturday.

8th Light was a great place to be hosted at; I got a chance to pair with Micah (on Playbills), Paul (for a bit while we struggled with ActiveResource) and then Eric Meyer on Friday (I have a video with Eric Meyer to put up), and I had a blast. I was very lucky to be able to spend Wednesday and Thursday evening with Micah, too, and we had some great conversations over the days about craftsmanship, apprenticeship and journeyman tours. 8th Light has an apprenticeship program, and he had some great ideas about creating a viable journeyman system, as well. At RubyConf, he did a talk on kata and sparring in software. You should check it out; it is great.

8th Light is building Limelight, which is a framework for building GUI's. It has a very interesting metaphor: a theater with stages, scenes, players and props. I had seen a couple presentations on it, but actually working in it gave me a new sense of respect for it. Check it out, for sure. Plus, 8th Light is hosting sparring competitions (they just finished a battleship AI tournament) using Limelight as the front-end.



Talk with Micah Martin from Corey Haines on Vimeo.