Charlie Griefer

So remember a few months back when I was all like, "I'm going OO, and i'm going to document my progress so maybe other folks will learn what i'm learning"? Yeah, that didn't go so well. For me, my OO journey has been decidedly hit-and-miss (more miss than hit, unfortunately). I think my attempt to document that journey reflected that.

For me, I think the issue is that I wasn't working in OO day-to-day. I'd learn how to do something, but then I'd get confused as to what the next logical step should be. Or, I'd talk to somebody who would suggest that what I had learned wasn't necessarily how they would do it, and I'd step back. What I really needed was a mentor. One person that I had access to during the course of the day, that I could bounce ideas off of. One person that could show me *their* way (regardless of whether or not it was how others did it), and I could journey down that particular road. Later on, I'd hope to have enough of a conceptual grasp that I'd be able to say, "Wait... what about doing it *this* way?".

I may finally be in that situation. Jon Messer recently joined us at Amcom. Jon's somewhat of an OO God, altho he'll try and tell you otherwise (and he'll be terribly embarrassed at reading this). In the few months that Jon's been here, working with him has been a privilege, and one for which I'm very grateful.

Now, this is more than just a "neener-neener-neener-I-have-a-mentor-and-you-don't" post. Jon's very much into helping others learn, and has started a series of his own blog posts in which he's going to attempt to demystify the concepts of building OO applications. I think this series is largely going to be what I was previously attempting, with the significant difference that Jon's already at a point where he can teach what he knows (as opposed to trying to teach what he's learning).

The series comes out of an evaluation that he had done of some of the ColdFusion MVC frameworks, and deconstructs the code that he used.

This promises to be an interesting and educational series. I'd highly suggest that if you're still making the transition from procedural to OO, you sit in. Feel free to post questions, or just a comment to let him know what you think about his approach.