Influencer Appreciation Week: Jean Paul Boodhoo & Joey Beninghove

In 2006 I was working on a Smart Client application. Scouring the internet for help with "best practices" I stumbled across an episode of DNRTV with Jean Paul Boodhoo. He was talking about this thing called test driven development. I had read a couple of books on XP, and I had written a couple of unit test in my previous job, but I had never heard of this concept of TDD. It made perfect sense to me, but I had alot of questions. I sent a very long rambling email to JP, not really expecting him to respond. I was shocked the next day when he actually called me on the phone to help answer my questions. It was amazing, and started me on my way to becoming and Agile developer.

A few months later Joey Beninghove managed to get JP to Richmond to teach his 1 week Nothing but .NET class. I immediately signed up. The class was amazing. It introduced me to the concept of design patterns and helped me understand TDD better that I had managed to learn on my own. It also came with my first copy of ReSharper.

Thank you Jean Paul, for taking the time to respond to me, for introducing me to Agile. And thank you to Joey Beninghove for making the class possible.