The Cape Town SPIN (who don't believe in permalinks for meeting information, so you can only ever get information on the next Cape Town SPIN meeting) is meeting on Wednesday, March 19, to discuss Project Automation and Software Configuration Management.

Software Configuration Management

Software configuration management, and its central theme of version control, is and old topic, and yet many people ship software products without really getting all the potential benefits. In this talk I'll survey the current state of the art in tools and thinking. A few recommendations will be made, especially for small teams who are not too keen on heavy-weight process.

Project Automation

Performing repetitive tasks is tedious, error prone and never fun. Software projects is full of potentially boring but important task, such as building, testing and deployment.

Automating such tasks does not only relieve pain but also provide the development team with a useful early warning system. However, one needs to be pragmatic about the time spent creating and maintaining automated tasks.

These are topics close to my heart (and memory, since this is what I've spent a large chunk of my time focusing on the last few months), so I'll probably be at the Bandwidth Barn from 18:15 next Wednesday to hear what the speakers have to say.

The Cape Town SPIN will be holding a meeting, tonight from 6:15pm to 8:15pm at the Bandwidth Barn.  The topics under discussion are Static vs. Dynamically typed languages, and waterfall vs. agile development practices.

According to the agenda:

1. Dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby are getting a lot of mind-share these days, some touting such benefits as developer productivity, ease of use and learning, introspection, increased expressiveness etc. The real advantages and implicit costs in production environments are rarely discussed, however. We want to take this opportunity to air some of the points of view and share practical experiences with both.

2. Agile methods vs Waterfall software development methodologies. Agile methods such as SCRUM and variations on Extreme Programming are gaining in popularity. Many local groups have used such approaches with varying degrees of success. Equally many remain skeptical, believing it would never work in their domain. We'd like to hear both sides of the story in this discussion.

Not sure if I'm going to make it, but it could be quite entertaining and enlightening.  Or it could be very sad, with the static people saying "I really like that it's static!" and the dynamic people saying "I really like that it's dynamic!" all night.