Hillside Group

The Hillside Group

Formation	1993
Membership	121
Official language	English
President	Joseph Yoder
Website	www.hillside.net

The Hillside Group is an educational nonprofit organization founded in August 1993 to help software developers analyze and document common development and design problems as software design patterns. The Hillside Group supports the patterns community through sponsorship of the Pattern Languages of Programs conferences.

In August 1993, Kent Beck and Grady Booch sponsored a mountain retreat in Colorado where a group converged on foundations for software patterns. Ward Cunningham, Ralph Johnson, Ken Auer, Hal Hildebrand, Grady Booch, Kent Beck and Jim Coplien struggled with Alexander's ideas and our own experiences to forge a marriage of objects and patterns. The Group agreed that we were ready to build on Erich Gamma's foundation work studying object-oriented patterns, to use patterns in a generative way in the sense that Christopher Alexander uses patterns for urban planning and building architecture. We then used the term generative to mean creational to distinguish them from Gamma patterns that captured observations. The Group was meeting on the side of a hill when all this occurred, hence the name.

Since then, the Hillside Group has been incorporated as an educational non-profit. It currently sponsors and helps run various PLoP (Pattern Languages of Programming) conferences such as GuruPLoP, PLoP, EuroPlop, ChiliPlop, GuruPLoP, Asian PLoP, Scrum PLoP, Viking PLoP and Sugarloaf PLoP. Following are a list of historical PLoP conferences sponsored by The Hillside Group: ParaPLoP, KoalaPLoP, Mensore PLoP, ParaPLoP, Meta PLoP and UP97) The Hillside Group has also been responsible for getting the Pattern Languages Of Program Design series of books put together and published.