Awkward

Coding meet-ups are a great place to meet new people and learn things you don't know. There are a number of user groups in the Nashville area for PHP, Javascript, Java, Python, Ruby, etc. Often times the topics aren't totally language specific so I bounce around between them. Most group have a monthly talk with socialization and often food before and after. Tonight I went to the PHP one, which is on the eastern edges of Nashville - the main reason I haven't been going to it before now. Brandon Savage spoke this week on the common pitfalls of OO programming. I have also reached the point where I recognized and had spoken too most of the people in attendence. On the one hand this is comforting, but the socially awkward side of me remembers facts and figures about folks but doesn't know how to converse in a non-programmatic way at networking events. 1). Introduce self with elevator story appropriate to event type with attributes most likely to include areas of common interest. 2). Question fellow conversant about themselves (Tell me about yourself? or So what do you do?). 3). Find area of common interest based on 2 and a) demostrate subject matter mastery or b) demostrate interest in knowledge growth and attempt to draw subject matter information from fellow conversant or c) exist conversation if none exists. 4). Start of talk or need to get home provides out to end conversation. As you can see, this algorithm doesn't really apply to second and subsequent conversations. Tonight I had several of those and avoided several others, feeling somewhat bad for not saying something to everyone I knew. A few weeks back we brought a guy in for an interview at Leadspedia and tried to hire him. Marcus didn't feel it was as good of a fit as we did though, but he was also interviewing elsewhere. His current employer was host to this particular event, so I didn't openly broach the issue when I saw him tonight. Our conversation was brief. Then I saw Conlan, who I worked with at PatientFocus, and caught up with him over dinner. There wasn't too much though, because we had a karaoke night with Cara & Jandra a couple weeks back. It was Cara's first time doing karaoke. She LOVED it. Señor Savage gave his talk: The Seven Deadly Sins of Object Oriented Programming (video). According to him these are 1) Tight coupling 2) Extending the interface 3) One class, many responsibilities 4) Overuse of statics 5) Overbearing interfaces 6) Failure to object-orient 7) Over abstraction After the talk I ended up in a conversation with Conlan AND Marcus. I wasn't sure how that happened, but they seemed to know eachother. That kind of took the awkward up a notch. I only remembered several hours later that Marcus was a fellow homebrewer, so there wasn't much I contributed to the conversation which mostly focused on hot chicken. On the drive home I put two and two together and realized that PatientFocus had hired Marcus! The whole evening was probably worthy of an episode of Seinfeld. Tonight I also learned that Moontoast folded, so there are some good folks out there looking for a job. I didn't have the social energy to pursue the funemployed gent I spoke to tonight (and trying not to beat myself up about it), but maybe we'll go after them...