So here I go, another member of the unwashed masses throwing his hat in the blogger arena. I know there are tens of thousands of blogs and bloggers already out there on the web, but I’ve yet to find a blog that is really geared to people like me. I don’t work for a Silicon Valley giant or an independent software vendor, and I’m not a consultant. I’m like most of you. I work for a mid-sized privately held company that on its best days will win a fight or two against the big boys.

We have an average sized development team of about 15 programmers, and I wouldn’t trade for any of them. They are all ridiculously smart, embrace constant change, and are always learning something new. In order to compete with the giants on Wall Street, we’ve had to get nimble by going agile. We’ve had to throw a lot of the traditional development methods out and cut our own path through the jungle. This blog will be an insight into the journey we’re taking. We’ve taken a lot of what we saw working in other shops and combined some of the best methods to form an agile environment that works for us. So we won’t call it XP, lean, or scrum. We’ve taken what we feel are the best of those worlds and apply them daily.

For the mea culpa: right now, I know what I know, and everything I write is the most intelligent way I know of doing something. If I knew of a better way to do something, I would be doing it that way. Seems kind of like a no brainer, but I thought it had to be said. Hopefully, two or three years from now, I’ll look back on some of these posts and think, ‘wow, I had no idea what I was doing.’ That’s the process of learning and growing that I love so much. I hope you enjoy the ride as well.