On February 13, 2009, an inside joke turned into this website, thanks to a lunch time trip to White Castle the day before.  The true story behind the meaning of the Learning Turkey name has not yet been told on this site.  Today, on the three year anniversary, is the day to tell said story.

It all begins in 2007, with a little program called HTS.  The goal: take a legacy mainframe application and rewrite it for a server environment.  The challenge: do it with a team made up of resouces who know the mainframe and not necessarily new-fangled technologies like Oracle or Java.  To help with the transition, it was decided to put together a website to store helpful documents where people could start to get up to speed.  This website was called the Community of Learning!  Now, someone had to be put in charge of maintaining and populating the Community of Learning.  Enter Dennis Watts.

Dennis had joined the team a few years earlier and, what he lacked in talent, he made up for with bad ideas.  While most of those ideas had been discarded (the Employee of the Month parade), he was allowed to run wild with the Community of Learning.  Within weeks, there were signs posted around the floor touting the Community of Learning, featuring an old picture of John Belushi from Animal House and a changing narrative structure.  These signs managed to outlast both the program and Dennis, and were the topic of conversation on the fateful lunch trip to White Castle on 2/12/09.

Somehow, the old Community of Learning came up on the drive out to White Castle, which led to someone commenting that Dennis was a “turkey.”  Eventually, this became Dennis the Learning Turkey, and the next day became the genesis of this website and its original premise.