Oooooh, my first process pattern. All of the patterns I had written to date talked about programming things. This column introduced the first pattern that talks explicitly about people activities.

Jim Coplien was one of the first people to start writing lots of good patterns. Even though he is a good programmer, he chose to write his patterns out of his experience analyzing software development organizations. I was skeptical at first—what do these patterns of how people behave have to do with programming? It was around the time of this article that I began to realize that his perspective was as important as mine. It doesn't matter how good a job you do if you're doing the wrong job.

To make up for all the icky squishy stuff, I made sure I included plenty of code in the column. As aggressive as I think I am, looking at these columns reminds me that I go in the water half a toe at a time.