Flutterby™! : design strategy

Went over to the The San Francisco Perl Users Group last night for the Database Dependence as a Design Strategy, with Josh Berkus of the SF PostgreSQL Users' Group presentation. Interesting group, I think I'll be going back. It was cool to be outside of my usual social group, and as I was reminded by hanging out with that crowd last night, I really enjoy hanging out with some of the über geek sorts.

But it was also a reminder of how much my attitudes about software design and architecture have evolved. There were discussions about encapsulation of functionality in the database versus in the application that went on a lot longer than I thought, and at least one discussion of debugging that assumed that you could view things at a much higher level than has been my recent experience with trying to debug Microsoft .NET distributed applications (maybe the Microsoft experiences are just making me assume the worst).

But it was good to get out of my cocoon of application development and realize that there are also still people out there doing cool stuff, and I need to connect with more of 'em.