Welcome to the new Cambridge Software Craftsmanship Community blog. The purpose of this blog is to document the meetings of the Community, including useful outcomes and tidbits from our round-tables, notes and documentation from the workshops.

Who are we?

We are a regular Meetup group for software developers who care about and take pride in what they do and how they do it. Modelled on the London Software Craftsmanship Community, I hope to bring some of their success to the Cambridge software community.

Software Craftsmanship has grown out of Agile, with many of the leading lights in the Craftsmanship movement being the founders of the Agile movement as well.

The Software Craftsmanship Manifesto describes the movement as follows:

As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft. Through this work we have come to value:

• Not only working software, but also well-crafted software
• Not only responding to change, but also steadily adding value
• Not only individuals and interactions, but also a community of professionals
• Not only customer collaboration, but also productive partnerships That is, in pursuit of the items on the left we have found the items on the right to be indispensable.

© 2009, the undersigned. This statement may be freely copied in any form, but only in its entirety through this notice.

Through this group, I hope to tackle the third point from the manifesto and create and encourage a community of professionals in the Cambridge area.

What meetings do you run?

Round-Table Discussions

We meet regularly on the first Tuesday of each month at Red Gate Software for a Round-Table Discussion. The format of these meetings is open and welcoming to all. Topics are decided by the group from a selection proposed by attendees on the night, potentially following on from preceding lightning talks. We normally cover a couple of topics, and occasionally split into smaller groups to discuss separate subjects.

Lightning talks are short-format presentations, optionally including slides, lasting no more than 5 minutes. You do not need to have anything prepared in advance, just turn up and talk!

Workshops

Often, we meet on the third Tuesday of the month at Granta Design for an interactive workshop. These cover varying aspects of programming, including test-driven development, refactoring, object-oriented design, or functional programming. We have also delved into new languages such as Clojure and Haskell, and learned about hard computing problems like machine learning.