Another Learning Lunch

Today I had another learning lunch.  This time, Gerry and I met Matt Deiters at Panera in Delafield which is much more convenient for me than going downtown.  A co-worker of Matt’s, Chris, was also there.

Sidenote: Matt and Chris are very bright guys.  I typically consider myself to be of above average intelligence, but when I’m around people like them, I can see just how much that I don’t even know that I don’t know.

Next Tuesday (May 10), Matt is speaking about Design Patterns in .NET at the WI .NET Users Group.  Today he ran through his presentation with Gerry and me.  It was practice for him and learning for us.  It was very interesting, and my only two complaints were:

1. I got there late and had to wait for the lunch rush to die down before I could get any food.
2. I wish we had another 3 hours to talk about this stuff.

I did find out that something I developed just last week used the Strategy Pattern.  I didn’t know that then, and I’m still not 100% sure about all the details of this pattern, but his code sample looked very similar to my application.  I have to admin that I felt pretty good about that, even though, at the time, I didn’t really understand the relevance of what I was doing.

Anyway, he only skimmed his slide deck and we spent most of the lunch in the code (due to time constraints at lunchtime), but I liked that better and it was very interesting.  Gerry and I each had a few questions and comments, but overall it made sense.  I understood what was going on, although I may not be able to tell you when something should be done using one of these patterns.

He’s going to be recommending a few books and other resources, so I’ll be sure to check into those.  If anyone has any suggestions or reviews (good or bad) of their own, feel free to list them here in comments.

Like Sean, Matt is another guy that I could definitely learn a lot from.  I’ll have to try to have lunches like these more often.