I'm Nicholas (Nick) Lesiecki. I graduated from Amherst College about four years ago with a degree in English (strong focus on creative writingexperimental videography). I was also the leader of my college's improvisational comedy troupe. Realizing that no one was going to pay me to write unless I wanted to write ad copy (yergh!) I landed a job in software development. After a rocky start, I hit upon the agile movement in the form of Kent Beck's XP Explained. I quickly grasped that the agilists viewed software as a creative process, and emphasized concepts and practices that I had found essential in other creative fields (team gelling, collaborative creativity, constant revision). I fell in love, and have spearheaded the adoption of XP at two companies thus far. I also coauthored Java Tools for Extreme Programming in 2001. Later that year, AOP caught my attention. I was fascinated by its ability to solve a class of difficult OO problems with simplicity and elegance. AOP seemed to concretize in a language another aspect of human thought-much the way OOP concretizes our notion of "things." Since then, I've written a couple of articles on AOP, joined Aspect Mentor (a confederation of consultants and teachers), and coauthored Mastering AspectJ. I currently serve VMS (http:vmsinfo.com) as principal software engineer and mentor in the areas of J2EE, AOP, and software development.
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