Historical Archive & Dedicated User Group Hub

Software Craftsmanship McHenry County (SCMC)

The dedicated practitioner hub of recorded user group presentations, technical sessions, and developer community interviews.

SCMC presentation · September 15, 2026

Phalanx Duel: make the rules legible

A play-first presentation about a tactical card game, deterministic rules, and the evidence a system needs to explain an outcome. The presentation page includes the editable deck and a two-page, printer-friendly guide for playing a physical duel.

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The Origin & Purpose of SCMC

Software Craftsmanship McHenry County (SCMC) was started in late 2009 to give suburban developers a polyglot, language-agnostic space to practice craft, automated testing, and system architecture without a two-hour commute into downtown Chicago. Mike Hall co-founded SCMC with Ryan Gerry and Jim Suchy.

Early meetings were roving and grassroots, gathering in library meeting rooms, Panera backrooms with temperamental projectors, and upstairs tables at Duke's Alehouse in Crystal Lake. The group found its permanent home when Ryan Gerry secured meeting and presentation facilities at Follett Software Company in McHenry.

The archive below documents the technical sessions, hands-on workshops, and practitioner presentations recorded during those formative years at Follett. Ryan Gerry continued running SCMC after Mike stepped away after the two-year anniversary, sustaining and guiding the group for over a decade and a half so that it continues to meet today with over 820 members on Meetup.com.

SCMC operated as an independent local user group alongside other regional developer initiatives in the Midwest craft movement, such as Chicago ALT.NET and Software Craftsmanship North America (SCNA). While SCMC and SCNA were distinct entities, practitioners and community leaders frequently presented across both venues and contributed to the shared oral history preserved in the UGtastic interview canon.

Speaker: Andy Lester

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Featured SCMC Session Presenters

Practitioners and guest speakers who gave recorded technical presentations at Software Craftsmanship McHenry County (SCMC) monthly meetings:

Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin

Co-author of Agile Manifesto • Clean Architecture

SCMC Presentation: The A Word: Architecture (Vimeo-30083598)
UGtastic Interview: Filling the Vessel: Craft of Performance

Igor Polevoy

Creator of ActiveJDBC & ActiveWeb

SCMC Presentation: ActiveJDBC & ActiveWeb for Java (Vimeo-38936294)
UGtastic Interview: Java Development Tools & Frameworks

Andy Lester

Creator of ack • Perl Core Contributor

SCMC Presentation: Enough C To Get Started In F/OSS (Vimeo-26669252)
UGtastic Interview: Open Source & Project Maintenance

Scott Seely

Software Architect & Author • Founder of LCNUG

SCMC Presentation: Beginner C++ for Expert Programmers (Vimeo-38723757)
UGtastic Interview: Lake County .NET User Group (LCNUG)

Mike Jansen

Front-End Engineer & TDD Advocate

SCMC Presentation: TDD Your JavaScript With Backbone.js (Vimeo-37080647)
UGtastic Interview: Developer Education & Learning

Andy Maleh

Guest Presenter • Creator of Glimmer DSL

SCMC Presentation: Software Craftsmanship VS Software Engineering (Vimeo-44387717)

Billy Whited

UX & Front-End Designer

SCMC Presentation: Front End Craftsmanship: Toward a More Meaningful Web (Vimeo-32266297)

Michael Buselli

Security Engineer & Systems Specialist

SCMC Presentation: Blind SQL Injection (Vimeo-27889917)

Synthesized Historical Lessons from SCMC

Grassroots Meetups Acted as Enterprise R&D Labs: SCMC meetings provided the experimental ground where TDD, Sidekiq, ActiveJDBC, and AOP patterns were vetted before being adopted by high-growth startups like Groupon and ActiveCampaign.
Polyglot Runtime Transition: SCMC sessions bridged the transition from legacy .NET/Java monoliths to dynamic Ruby, Clojure, Python, and Node.js environments across Chicagoland.
Community Drives Engineering Leadership: Meetup organizers were the primary architects of the talent pipelines that powered Chicago's 2010–2015 tech surge.
Durable Wisdom Over Hype: Verbatim video/audio archiving preserves fundamental principles, such as Uncle Bob's "Filling the Vessel" and Corey Haines' practice mindset, that are directly applicable to modern AI-augmented development.

Live rewatch series

The Sound Above

A live technical rewatch series revisiting the UGtastic interviews through a 2026 lens across 37 episodes and 6 movements. SCMC is a founding era anchor: the grassroots origin room and practitioner network that helped shape the Chicago craft movement.