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Seperation of Church and Foo?

Sunday morning at Baa Camp saw me quietly slipping away to the Mahurangi College's main hall for the local community church service. Outside of differences in size and scale from Christian Life Center Auckland where I normally attend, the small community meeting shared all the required basics: community; and Christ, the message preached that morning also seemed to fit perfectly everything going on at Baa Camp itself.

The message was centered around Mathew 5 which starts:

And seeing the multitudes, He went up on a mountain, and when He was seated His disciples came to Him. Then He opened His mouth and taught them.

The message spoke of how Christ left the mainstream crowd in order to teach, and how following the teaching the deciple's would return to the crowd and share of what they had learnt. I was struck with the relevance of this one verse to what we're doing at Baa Camp - we've left the mainstream community of the world to sit at the feet of some of the countries top thinkers and creators; we learn; we grow; then we return to the world and preach.

I see this more relating to the various software development practices being talked about at Baa Camp - from Gary Ballinger's talk on Rapid Application Development (Flex, Rails, Django etc.) to Stephen Viles talk on Fuzz testing with RSpec and Heckle (tormenting your tests with heckle looks like a good introductory posting on the topic as well) to my various interjected commentaries on TestNG and continuous integration/deployment - we're all developers sitting on the edge of the crowd hungry to learn "the new true way" which will be bring enlightenment and salvation to our corporate day jobs - we're learning at the feet of those who have come before us so that we can return and share the gospel to our families (thou I'm still not entirely sold on Rails as that said 'new true way').

Coming away from Baa Camp I've had a set of questions answered, a whole bag full of questions raised, and a lot more scripture to follow up on including:

1. The implications of offline storage in Firefox/Safari/Opera (no Internet Explorer yet it seems) via the WhatWG Web Applications 1.0 specifications.
2. Light weighted distributed authentication/sso with OpenID
3. Off the Record message encryption for messaging systems.
4. The pros and cons of Maven versus Ivy as dependency management tools.
5. Open Message Queue and the Glassfish Application Server
6. Switching to Mac...

These are just a small faction of things that came to my attention over the weekend, theres still small conversations, parts of overheard conversations trickling back to conscious thought and the lack of sleep wears off that will continue to feed my interest and education over the coming months - and I can't wait to see what those months bring.

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