I'm currently a Fellow of the Technical Staff at Motorola Cellular Infrastructure Group in Arlington Heights, IL. I'm general chair for OOPSLA 2003. You can contact me at mailto:Ron.Crocker@Motorola.com.
Prior to working at Motorola, I was at Bell Labs, and worked with Jim Coplien. Most of my experiences with objects came from a brief intro as an undergrad and some "hands on" work at BL "debugging" the very first releases of C++ (If you think it's bad now, just think what it was like in 1984!)
I got interested in patterns at OOPSLA '93 from talking to Cope; my work at Motorola had been related to software architecture, and patterns seemed to be the natural thing for describing some of the reasons behind decisions made in the architecture that appeared in either the structure or philosophy but were difficult to explain.
Finally, it appears that patterns are making in-roads with the academic establishment, thanks to the work of people like Doug Lea, John Vlissides, Gerard Meszaros and others interacting with the academic crowd at places like ICSE.
I'm trying Extreme Programming in a project - I'm documenting it in Rons Xp Project. It's purposely abstract (see Vague Vs Abstract so I won't get into too much trouble with the lawyers.
See original on c2.com 