About

Adventures in Software Development!

I’m Jim Weaver, a software developer, course author, continual learner and teacher – with a bit of gray in my hair – OK, perhaps quite a lot of gray!

Early in my career, I spent a lot of time on waterfall-style government projects. On one of those projects I got to spend a few years in Korea and got married, so waterfall isn’t all bad! My experiences with stacks of design documentation that no one would ever read being required before any code was written primed me for agile software development, which I encountered in the late nineties after my escape from waterfall.

I ended up working for a consulting company that was an early advocate of Extreme Programming and other agile approaches, and then subsequently for Vanderbilt University Medical Center in a variety of capacities over the arc of my time there – often in leadership roles.

Throughout my career I’ve had an interest in testing, both the human kind and the automated kind, and have worked with testers and teams on approaches to testing in an agile context.

In what is probably the final stage of my career, I work as an independent trainer and consultant, including a number of video courses published on Pluralsight.

While I’ve acquired a bit of a cynical edge with regard to the IT industry in some respects (I’m working on a certification program called “Common Sense Software Development” that will only cost a few thousand dollars per head to become a Grand-Poohbah in), I still thoroughly enjoy learning new things and meeting new people and new problems to ponder.