Hi, I'm Chadrick and I'm a...

...developer. When I first understood that I could press my fingers to the keyboard and build content of some kind something happened within me. I felt like I was tapping into some secret ancient arcane power. I could summon things to the screen if I knew the right words to type. I could make things happen faster than the speed of thought. Its hold on me grew more and more. I would spend countless hours in a small room lit only by a monitor, learning and coding anything and everything I could. The more I learned, the more I believed anything was possible. If I could imagine it, I could produce it; or at least the potential to produce it was a real possibility. Now marry that to the fact that I've always been an ideas person and you can start to see that I had a real problem. In order to help me understand my addiction I had to find other practitioners of these arts. It was hard back then because I wasn't going to school for it or working in it full time, but we found each other. I learned that we spoke the same language, squinted at the sun in the same way when we had to be out in it, and tended to do our own things our own ways. To save my marriage I had to get paid for my addiction and then things started to change. I had to learn what it was like to go into business with someone who promised me one thing for doing what I loved and then gave me something else. After that experience I joined corporate IT and had to mature even more. I had to learn about this thing called source control, and there were these people called Business Analysts, and these documents called Specifications Documents and the ever present DEAD-LINE and other developers who freaked me out because they obviously knew more than I did. Around this time I came across a book called, Extreme Program Explained: Embrace Change. WOW! If I could only get my co-workers and managers to understand the benefits of what was in this book our lives would be forever changed for the better. At the time my influence didn't go real far, but I kept at it. Gradually the people started to see what I had seen. I became someone with a bit more influence and we all started to hear the word Agile more and more. A few years and companies later; I'm still not doing extreme programming everyday but I'm starting to practice some of those extreme practices I'd only read about, and others are doing it as well. I'm hoping we can write about our adventures and bring something helpful to the table. Here is to hope.