My summer has been what seems like a
steady stream of major events in the development community. It really
all began with my election to the board of GLUGnet last April, which immediately put me as a
planner for the first Lansing Day of .Net, for which I handled the web site
and branding. The event, which I blogged about previously, was
held on June 21, 2008, and was a huge success. We will definitely have
the conference again next year, and are already brainstorming ways to
make the event even better. Three weeks after LDODN, on July
11-13, was Ann Arbor Give Camp. Give
Camp was an event for charity, where area developers volunteered their
weekend to code for charity. The Heartland District truly displayed
their selflessness and passion with their willingness to endure three
days of Ninjas-On-Fire coding, often sacrificing sleep to accomplish
deadlines, to help out not-for-profits that likely would never have the
budget for a high-quality, professionally developed web site. I was
also impressed by the event sponsors for their donations and
contributions; Washtenaw Community College provided the venue for no cost, Verio
provided free hosting for each charity's site until 2010, and Microsoft
provided to each of the charities free copies of all of the software
needed to support and maintain the new applications. The planning staff
should be commended for this event, too; they went to no end to enable
the development teams, and to meet our every desire. There was plenty
of food, plenty of snacks, plenty of fluids, and plenty of games for
when we needed to occasionally decompress. We requested ice cream; we
got ice cream. Someone on my team even requested a Cherry Coke, and one
of the organizers made a midnight run to the local gas station to pick
up a bottle. The event was great, and we had a blast. I will be there
next year, maybe even running a team of my own. Another four weeks brought CodeStock, August 9, in Knoxville, TN. Dave Redding,
The Wife, and I hopped in Dave's Charger and cruised the nine hours
from Brighton, MI to Knoxville on Friday night, arriving at about
3:30am for the 7:30am registration. Michael Neel and crew put on a great show. I finally got to
see the Joe O'Brian / Amanda Laucher presentation on DSLs and Brian H. Prince's 'Soft Skillz
' talk. (I highly recommend both.) But what really made the event were
the Open Spaces, organized by Alan Stevens. We
had some enlightening discussions, such as improving User Group
participation, and developing in .Net on a Mac. The after party at
Alan's house included a time for socializing outside of a technical
setting, and included a friendly game of Texas Hold'em. Dennis Burton
was the big winner, and graciously donated his winnings to the Hands On
Museum in Ann Arbor, the charity that Michael Eaton worked on during
Give Camp. In the shortest gap of the summer, I only had to wait two more weeks for devLink, August 22-23, in Murfreesboro, TN. However, there was no 9 hour drive, as The Wife and I hitched a ride on the devLink Bus. Organized by Amanda Laucher
(and others)--my employer, Latitude Consulting Group, was also one of
the sponsors--we chartered a coach for the weekend to take some of the
local developers down to devLink. The bus started in Grand Rapids, and
made pick-up stops in Lansing, Detroit, Toledo, Columbus, and
Cincinnati. We made some "detours" along the way, and the seats were a
little uncomfortable for sleeping, but we all had a great time; we had
some great discussion, we watched some movies, and Mike Eaton, The
Wife, Eric Vogel , and I even played a few rounds of euchre. We had one
minor glitch on the return trip, as one of the right rear tires blew
out at about 1:30am while traveling at 65mph up I-71, but we even had
fun on the 3 1/2 hour delay, as we took over a Waffle House in Carrollton, Kentucky, were entertained by "The Great Pork Chop Incident," and a
few riders extended the Open Spaces discussions from the conference. As for devLink itself, I went to focus on the Open Spaces. Four
different Open Space discussions were on hand for each of the session
blocks throughout the two-day conference. I attended sessions on
Developing the Developer Community; on why Comments are Evil; on How
"Should" Changed My Life (a discussion on BDD
, and creating effective tests); on Microsoft, Open Source, and
CodePlex; and I facilitated a discussion on Continuous Integration. I
only went to one session throughout the conference: Jeff Blankenburg's
talk on Silverlight. I challenged him to show me a reason to use
Silverlight that didn't include gradients, spinning ghost animations,
or anything else that I have been able to do in Flash since version 4.
After his talk, I'm actually motivated to dig in. Over the years, I
have created a few Flash games--nothing too special, as they were
primarily about learning a specific component, like collision
detection--and I plan on starting with converting them to Silverlight.
It should give me a good opportunity to grok the space. But to me, the best part about this summer isn't the things I have
learned, or the code I've produced, but the relationships and bonds
that have formed. I have made many new connections this summer, and
made some great new friendships, and I look forward to many more. The
list is made up of people all smarter than I am, yet I am treated as an
equal. Every time we connect, I learn a lot, professionally and
personally. I have grown a lot over this past year, and I owe every bit
of it to them (and to the kick in the pants from Dennis Burton that
pushed me to get involved in the first place). Here's to what's next.
A question
was posed on LinkedIn asking readers if they
used Twitter, and if so, how and why? Because
of the impact that Twitter has had on my life, I felt compelled to
answer. Twitter is a phenomenal tool that I
feel should be included in any developer's toolset. I use Twitter for
both business and personal reasons, including socializing
with friends, scheduling lunch, and also for networking with business
associates. There is
a lot of value in having a consolidated service through which I can
plan both happy hour and a business meeting. I have also made many new
business contacts through the service, and the personal nature of
Twitter communications have created relationships that are much more
solid than those from other services, such as LinkedIn. When I travel
to a conference such as devLink or Codestock, I often meet these
twitter contacts for the first time, yet the bond that has matured on
Twitter makes it seem like we have been friends for a long time. In addition to networking,
Twitter is effective with asking questions and getting quick responses
(similar to what was on LinkedIn), or for driving traffic to my blog by
promoting when there is a new post.
I access Twitter four different ways: through Witty on my primary
computer,
directly through the web when not at my primary computer, through
Twitterific on my iPod Touch, or through SMS on my phone.
The possibilities allow me to stay connected wherever I go. I have a
presence on many of the social networks, too, such a Pownce,
Jaiku, and Identi.ca, but I rely on Twitter. I can't live without it. Do you Twitter? How do you use Twitter? How has it had an impact on you?
Jeff Blankenburg came up with a good idea! As I go through my LinkedIn connections, I see that not many of them have recommendations. And it's not that these people don't deserve them--many of these connections I consider to be amongst the brightest people in the industry. As a community, and in many cases simple as a people, we don't often take the time to help each other out. We may pat each other on the back for recognition of talent, but we don't often do so in a public forum. Social Networking sites like linked in are phenomenal for things like job hunting, not necessarily for the networking but because potential employers will peruse these sites to gather information about a candidate, and these recommendations can go a long way towards impressing the employer. Enter Contribupendence Day! Jeff came up with the idea for one grand call-to-action where the entire community gets together to "tell the world about the people we work with." Everyone should comment / recommend / praise their friends, colleagues, associates on sites such as LinkedIn or Plaxo. No strings attached. No expectation that they will return the favor. Just do a good deed for your buddy, because that's what we should all be doing anyway, everyday. I have a few folks that I have been meaning to recommend, and I just haven't gotten around to it. This is good motivation, and a great idea. You should, too. Today we celebrate our Contribupendence Day.
Our first Lansing Day of .Net has come and gone. Plenty of people are blogging about it. After a stressful final week of creating designs for swag and for attendee badges, buying refreshments, and making last minute schedule changes, the event ran smoothly, and I am quite happy with the outcome. The group did an amazing job putting it all together. We had great attendance, phenomenal sponsorship, and great sessions. Corey Haines stepped in at the last minute for a speaker that was unable to make it, and did a commendable job by any standards, let alone that he assembled the entire talk within 24 hours. Once registration had closed, and things had settled down, I was also able to see sessions by Michael Eaton on Castle ActiveRecord, Jay R. Wren on Castle Windsor, Patrick Steele on Castle MonoRail, and WCF with James Bender, all of which were also well done. It was also great to meet-in-person the people I've been chatting with on Twitter or over the phone while organizing the event, as well as getting to know so many new people. I will see you all again, hopefully with you wearing my Lansing Day of .Net "i was there" t-shirt or drinking beer from my "i think i was there" pint glass! (They, too, turned out exactly as I had hoped.) "Hey. That's my art!" It is very cool to this web developer to see people walking around wearing my artwork. Thank you, again, to all of the organizations that sponsored the event, without whom the event wouldn't happen, to all of the speakers that helped us all learn new things about our craft, and to all of the attendees that made this event worth while. We need to do this again next year!
The day's agenda for Saturday's Lansing Day of .Net has been posted.
Registration will open at 7:30am with the first session starting at
8:30am. There will be 24 sessions throughout the day, spread across 4
rooms and 6 timeslots. Sessions will be divided by a 15 minute break,
and an hour break for lunch. The final session will end at 4:30, when
the closing and final raffle will be held. Saturday's schedule: 7:30 - 9:00 - Registration and Check-in 8:30 - 9:30 - First Sessions - Programming with Literal XML and Embedded Expressions (Paul Kimmel)
- The Entity Framework (Tim Golisch)
- Data Access with NHibernate (Len Smith)
- MicroISV: Start Your Own Software Company (Patrick Foley)
9:45 - 10:45 - Second Sessions - Well, Isn’t That Spatial… [SQL Server 2008 Spatial Data Type] (Jason Follas)
- LINQ For SQL - CRUD! (Joe Kunk)
- An Introduction to Castle ActiveRecord, or Stop Writing CRUD! (Michael Eaton)
- Regular Expressions can be your friend (Vijay Jagdale)
11:00 - 12:00 - Third Sessions - IronRuby, the DLR and Silverlight (Carey Payette)
- Windows Live: An API for Web 2.0 (Martin L. Shoemaker)
- Everyday Inversion of Control (Jay R. Wren)
- Structure and Guidance for Organizing Applications within Visual Studio (Keith Elder)
12:00 - 1:00 - Lunch 1:00 - 2:00 - Fourth Sessions - Be a Rules Follower: Windows Workflow Rules Engine (Michael Wood)
- Test Driven Development in C# (Philip Japikse)
- Monorail: An MVC Implementation on ASP.NET (Patrick Steele)
- Manage Complexity With Agility (Alan Stevens)
2:15 - 3:15 - Fifth Sessions - Enhancing Windows and Web Applications with Microsoft Presence (Chris Woodruff)
- Introduction to WPF (Jennifer Marsman)
- Introduction to Dependency Injection using Spring.NET (Ryan Montgomery)
- Agile Games (Amanda Laucher)
3:30 - 4:30 - Sixth Sessions - Agile Project Management with Scrum (Dan Rigsby)
- SQL Server 2008 for Developers (Sam Nasr)
- Distilling the Dynamic Language Runtime (Josh Holmes)
- Getting Started with WCF (James Bender)
4:30 - 5:00 - Closing and Raffle
GLUGnet (the .Net User Group in Lansing & Flint) is organizing a Microsoft .Net 2.0 Certification Study Group in pursuit of the “ Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist / Web-Client Development” certification. GLUGnet started one in Lansing, and I thought it would be a good idea for us to fire one up in the Flint area, as well. We will be using the MCTS Self-Paced Training Kits for Exam 70-536 (Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation) and Exam 70-528 (Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Web-Based Client Development). Both books are available from Amazon for around $45. Attendees will self-study one chapter per week, and meet together once a week to discuss that chapter as a group. If we miss a week due to holidays, we can decide to either double-up the next week, or to just skip the week and cover that chapter next time. At the end of each book, we will take the applicable exam. Each of the two exams are $125 each, and the schedule has us certified around mid-January. Exam 70-536 : Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation. ( Training Kit | Amazon) Study: June – September. (16 weeks). Exam: End of September. Exam 70-528 : Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Web-Based Client Development ( Training Kit | Amazon) Study: October – January. (13 Weeks) Exam: Mid-January The group will be meeting every Tuesday from 6pm-7pm at the Crossroads Meeting Room in the Cromaine District Library, Crossroads Branch in Hartland, MI ( http://tinyurl.com/4kpgul ). The facility will hold 30 people, and has Wi-Fi available. The first meeting will be next Tuesday (June 17) from 6pm-7pm. I realize that the 17th is short-notice, but I wanted to get rolling. Because of the short notice, this first meeting will be just getting a feel of who is interested, getting to know everyone, discuss everyone's experience with 2.0, and discussing the format. We will then each read through the first chapter on our own throughout the following week, and the first chapter will be discussed by group on the following Tuesday, June 24. I still encourage anyone that is interested to go. This group is open to the community and anyone is welcome. I hope to see you there.
Michael Eaton started it, and it sounds interesting, so I'll jump on the bandwagon, too. I need to post something, and maybe this will be a good writing exersize to get the posts flowing again. So, in 500 words (exactly, not counting the bold questions), how I took a flying leap into software development. And feel free to post your own answers, too. How old were you when you started programming?When I was 13 (1992) on the family's first computer: a shiny new 486DX2-66, with 8MB
of RAM, and those big-honkin' VLB I/O and Video cards. How did you get started in programming?Before that computer, I had never used one before, other than typing class in school or playing
MathBlaster or Oregon Trail in the library. I destroyed that machine a quite few times by running every .com or .exe on the machine just to see what it did. (FDisk is a very bad application for the uninitiated to play with.) Knowing how the thing worked led to manipulating it for my own motives: a full set of startup configurations in config.sys/autoexec.bat to eek out every last Kb of base memory. Anything to make Wolfenstein or Doom run just a little faster. And the obsession with video games led me to start writing my own when VB3 launched in '93. Woo-hoo, I could write games!! And I could trash that computer even faster. My mother bought a Iomega Ditto drive to back up her files every night, so that when I trashed it she wouldn't loose anything. I started playing around with web programming in mid-94 with my AOL account, and completely bailed in Windows programming in favor of Web in 1995 when I signed up for one of the first accounts on GeoCities. What was your first language?
Batch Language. Or Visual Basic. What was the first real program you wrote?
A vertical scrolling shoot 'em up in VB3, similar to Raptor (I loved that game) or Tiger-Heli. Even made my own sprites and bitmaps in Paint!! What languages have you used since you started programming?Classroom-only: C++, Perl, PL/SQL, Scheme, and QBasic. Personally/Professionally: ActionScript (Flash), ASP, C, C#, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Lingo (Macromedia Director), PHP, Ruby, T-SQL, VB, VB.Net, VBScript, and XML. What was your first professional programming gig?
The first code-for-food was in 1995; I got about US$150 for building a few web pages Baypoint Communications. The first full-time gig was in 1999 at Navistream in Rochester, NY (Now BrandLogic) as a New Media Developer. My college's career center didn't have any positions for Web Development, and I was having a tough time finding an internship. I weaseled my way onto the Career Center web site for RIT (near my home town) and found a posting for Navistream. I contacted the company directly and landed an interview. When the interviewer asked me how I found out about them, I told them the story. They were impressed with my initiative and I got the job. If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?Yes. Absolutely. It is a little difficult at times, but it is definitely something I love doing. Unless I could have been a professional racecar driver. If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?Do it for You, not for Them. In this business, it is essential that you keep the passion and spirit that made you like programming in the first place, otherwise it becomes a chore. Find a company that will encourage that passion, and stay connected with other like-minded people through things like user groups, conferences, or even Twitter. What's the most fun you've ever had...programming?
I particularly enjoy projects that are off the reservation. Amazing things happen when developers get some down-time to go code whatever they want.
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The first ever Lansing Day of .Net will be held on Saturday, June 21, 2008, at the Lansing Community College West Campus, in Lansing, MI. The event, hosted by Greater Lansing Users Group for .Net, is a one day by-developers-for-developers conference regarding topics related to .Net development, and best of all, it is free. Registration is not yet open, but will be soon. Keep an eye out on glugnet.org and dodn.org for more information. "We have a great facility and a big chunk of time, we just need to fill the slots with all the brilliant speakers in the area. So if you are willing to come and share your expertise with your fellow developers in the area, please lend a hand." ~ Jeff McWherter
LDODN is currenly looking for interested speakers. If you are interested, please email "program (dot) director (at) glugnet (dot) org" by Wednesday, May 14. Submissions will be selected by Monday, 19 May, and will receive email confirmation.
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