I thought I'd post the notes that Ben took for us during the first meeting. I don't suspect we'll have a scribe every meeting so you'll have to start coming if you didn't make this last one. :)
What I really wanted to glean from the notes that Ben provided was the list of topics we think the group might cover at some point in the future. We did make a decision that we liked the "fish bowl" style of open discussion rather than presentations so we'll stick to that for the foreseeable future. Next meeting I'll seed a whiteboard list with a couple of the items below and then as people come in they can add their own topics to the list on the whiteboard. We'll take a vote on what to cover that evening and start from there.
- Deployment Models (Win/Web, Thick/Thin, Mobile)
- Handling the -illities Responsibility, Availability, Scalability, etc.
- Failures /Successes/ War Stories - Summary/Case Study
- Implementation
- Peer Support/Mentoring
- Architect Simulation - come up with a fictitious project and architect it.
- Ethics
- Tools
- Resources
- Modeling
- "Selling it to the business"
- "Whys and not the Hows"
- Patterns
- Design vs. Abstract
- TLAs that end in D (TDD, etc.) "X driven Design"
- Virtualization
- N-Tier Discussion (Layers & Design)
Feel free to also add your own ideas to this thread...but if you don't see it on the whiteboard one meeting, add it!
Michael Wood
http://www.mvwood.com/blog
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." --Thomas Edison