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Two Big Updates, 1 Big Blog Post!

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It has been a whirlwind week here at Fritz headquarters, and I have not one but TWO announcements for you.

First, it should be no secret to those of you that know me that I really enjoy the medium of radio.  I love working a microphone, and the opportunities I have had to be on various podcasts have been nothing but pure joy for me.  For the past year, I have been assembling a number of training screencasts.  You probably saw one here and a few over on CodeProject.TV 

At long last, I can announce that I have been accepted as a Pluralsight author and will be producing videos covering Microsoft ASP.Net web technology.  The first topic that I am working on is a course on Facebook app development with ASP.Net MVC.  I am very excited about this opportunity, and will be putting in some time to ensure that I deliver a great course for you. 

For the second announcement, I’ll direct your attention to my Events page.  I have started listing events on this site for the last six months, and even added a map with pins to show where I have been speaking and where I will be speaking.  Coordinating lectures is a labor of love, and requires a lots of patience and negotiation skills.  I have been applying to speak at various venues, and found some small successes up to this point.  I can proudly announce that this streak has been broken, and I will be speaking at the AngleBrackets conference at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in October.  I’m looking forward to this conference and feel privileged to be included with this group.

 Three of my lectures have been chosen to be presented at the conference.  I am really looking forward to this conference and hanging with the great group of speakers that have been selected.

I will have one more announcement later this week before I leave for Tech Ed in New Orleans.  June is shaping up to be a GREAT month for me.

A wrap-up of my April travel

Wow… what a month of April.  If you have been following me on Twitter or Foursquare, you know that I’ve done a bit of travelling and a bit of speaking this past month.  This is the wrap-up of those events, and a look ahead at my future schedule.

First Stop… Boston!

For the first week of April, I spent three days in Boston at the Telerik home office and in a private company event.  I got to present to some guests at this event, and spend some time with the most of the Telerik DevTools Developer Evangelists.  It was a good couple of days to recharge my batteries on Telerik products and work with my team.  I met a number of really great people in our technical community that I really need to ensure I keep in touch with.  I can’t say too much more about this event, but you will be seeing the fruits of it in the weeks and months ahead.

April 9 – Pittsburgh.Net

On the 9th, I drove across the commonwealth of Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh to speak to the Pittsburgh.Net user group.  This group meets in the Microsoft office that resides in the shadows of Heinz Field (home of the Steelers) and PNC Park (home of the Pirates).  The 60 developers in attendance gave me their ears for 90 minutes and I gave the first run of my One ASP.Net presentation.  This presentation was going to run a bit longer than I expected, and I ended up cutting some of my demos in favor of pre-written code.

The group enjoyed my presentation and wrote as such on their Meetup website.  Thank you Pittsburgh.Net for your hospitality!

April 17 – Philly.Net

It was time for some home cooking, and I had a session at my home user group – Philly.Net.   This group always turns out for good content, and this evening was no exception.  120 people registered and it was standing room only for this evening.  My buddy John Petersen spoke for the first half of the evening on the cool new features in ASP.Net 2012.2 and then I got to give my One ASP.Net talk in the remaining 45 minutes.  I cut my talk down even further from the Pittsburgh session, and managed to squeeze in all of the topics I wanted to cover.

It is always great to speak to this group, not just because I know so many of them, but because they REALLY know their stuff.  The questions from the Philadelphia crew are always very deep, and they’re not afraid to tell you their opinion.  I received a suggestion during my session to assemble some of the content that I had with some sample code, scripts, and how-tos into a unified resource that developers and project managers could reference when making decisions about employing hybrid-ASP.Net techniques.  This is a brilliant idea, and you will see the results of that effort in the next week or two.

April 23 – CapArea.Net

My final visit of the month was in the Washington DC suburbs for the CapArea.Net user group.  This was a very curious group that was just coming off of a weekend with their Code Camp.  About 30 people showed up for my talk about One ASP.Net and this time I had a full two hours to present the content.  I put all of my demos into this one, and still came up short on time.  I guess its better to have more content and not need it, than to run out of things to talk about…

This group was very interested in Telerik and our products.  I was afraid that I turned the end of the session into a bit of a sales pitch, but the group seemed very interested, and for that I thank them.

Home, for now…

After those four user groups, my family is ready for me to be home for a bit.  This won’t last too long, as I have visits on the books for Arizona, New Orleans, Northern New Jersey, and Tennessee in the months ahead.  I’m also looking at some other interesting groups in the Southwest and Midwest, planning a possible pair of road trips.

Agile Development and Professional Development Teams

I’ve been an avid reader and follower of Agile Methodologies since 2003 when I read “Teach Yourself Extreme Programming in 24 Hours“.  This short and simple book laid the groundwork for my entrance into Extreme Programming and eventually a Scrum team approach to software.

In recent years, many organizations have embraced the Scrum methodology.  The big promises management hears are:

  • Developers will produce more code in a shorter amount of time
  • You can change your in-house applications more easily
  • Defect rates will go to zero

All very good things.  But these results are impossible to achieve if the development team is not staffed with professionals.  

“Uncle” Bob Martin visited the Philly.Net usergroup in December 2012 and shared with us his thoughts on what makes up a professional development team:

Demanding Professionalism: Uncle Bob @ Philly .NET User Group (PLUS WordWrap Kata) from 8th Light on Vimeo.

5 New Years Resolutions for this Developer in 2013

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As I look forward to 2013, I have nothing but hope and joy for the things that I look to accomplish over the next 12 months. As a developer, I put together a list of 5 things that I should accomplish this year. None of these are a given, but they are all thing that I feel are within reach in the year ahead.

1. 100 Blog posts in 2013

I want to write a minimum of two technical blog posts a week. There is enough technical content to be documented and shared that this should be a very attainable goal. Some of these 100 posts will appear here on csharpfritz.com and some will also appear on blogs.telerik.com Either way, YOU my dear reader benefit from more FREE technical content.

2. 20 Speaking engagements

Over the course of the last year, I gave 8 sessions at user groups, code camps, and conferences. Over the course of the coming year, I’d like to double that number. You should see me at approximately 2 events a month, and I hope they aren’t all concentrated on the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.
I’d like to get at least 1, preferably several of these speaking engagements outside of North America. There are opportunities for me to engage in Europe, and I want to capitalize on at least one of those events.

3. 6 Webinars / Screencasts

I issues a screencast in July on this website where I demonstrated a technique in developers writing unit tests with the Nancy web framework. This was an exercise I thoroughly enjoyed, and would like to issue more screencasts on testing techniques, Asp.Net development tips and tricks, and other .Net goodness. I’d like to deliver on this promise at least every other month. You will find all of this content for FREE on YouTube.

4. Bring Webforms Back in Style

Many Asp.Net developers have been migrating away from the original Asp.Net webforms architecture. This is not a bad development technique, nor is it deprecated by Microsoft in any way. I want to write enough documentation and give enough presentations that demonstrate the advantages of webforms compared to other Asp.Net techniques to keep webforms in the forefront of your mind when you choose to build your next web application.
This goal is a true test of the scope of my influence, and will be tested as Microsoft grows and evolves the Asp.Net and Windows Azure platforms. To truly accomplish this goal, I will need to engage representatives at Microsoft and receive their approval in the type and style of content that I deliver.

5. Write a book

This is the big one… this goal is the furthest reach for me. Each of the other goals are things that I need to keep pace with over the course of the year. I want to compile my experiences and engage a publisher, or self-publish on Amazon. There are many things that I have learned from my years of designing and building large scale multi-tenant, software-as-a-service applications that I think the development community would really like to hear. If I want to keep to some sort of a schedule to complete this in the course of 2013, I should have a first draft ready by June 1. That should afford me enough time to publish by October 1. We will see how this goal progresses, as it is the one I am most excited about.

Conclusion

That’s it, my 5 developer resolutions or goals for 2013. Its an ambitious list, but I think its one that I can cover more of in the year ahead. I encourage you to follow along with me as I pursue this list. More details about my engagements and upcoming schedule will always be posted on the events page of this site.

My Top 6 Moments of 2012

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It’s New Years Eve here in the Philadelphia area, and like many others, I’m reflecting over the past twelve months. 2012 has been an amazingly great year for me. I’m going to count down the top 6 moments that affected me over the past 12 months.

6. QUnit-Metro launch

In April and May of this year, I attended a handful of Windows 8 developer training events. At each of these events I learned a lot about how to create a Windows 8 application with HTML and JavaScript. However, I am very much a developer who has embraced the test-driven development mindset. At each one of these events I faced the same challenge again and again: How do I test this JavaScript code that I am writing for Windows 8?

I challenged myself then and there. I took the evening after one of these training events and attempted to utilize the qUnit test framework with Windows 8. After some tinkering, hacking, and a bit of luck, I got unit tests to run inside of the Metro environment. I cleaned up my changes and published them as a fork of the qUnit framework that I called “qUnitMetro”. This was the first project that I successfully forked and shared source code for. The amount of attention that this little project would get over the next few months was astonishing.

5. Joined Telerik

After a long journey that spread across the US East Coast from Orlando to Philadelphia, to Boston and back, I started my employment with Telerik on December 3rd. This journey to join Telerik was an amazing ride, meeting and interviewing with people that I knew from Code Camps, User Groups meetings, and some that I had never met but had heard on podcasts. I was genuinely excited to be counted as one of their peers and join this amazing organization.

I’m now a month into working at Telerik, and you should be seeing my name starting to appear more and more around the Asp.Net community. I promise you, I have a lot more to share and show. Over the next year, you should see me at a number of large events and perhaps at a Code Camp or two near you. Keep up with me here and on my Telerik product blog at: http://blogs.telerik.com/AjaxTeam

4. Code Camp NYC

At the beginning of September, I attended and spoke at Code Camp NYC. This was the first big code camp that I was traveling to speak at. Furthermore, I was spending my own money to get there. By financing the whole trip myself, I made myself more critical of my experience. I wanted to really figure out if this was it, if I was ready to do more as an INETA speaker.

The trip to New York was simple, a train ride from Philadelphia to Penn Station. As I was disembarking the train, I coincidentally ran into another Philly area speaker who was attending the event: John Petersen. Our discussion during the walk to the Microsoft office in Manhattan was refreshing and really opened my eyes to what my place could be in the developer community. The day I spent at that event, meeting the other speakers and interacting with the New York area developers helped convince me: I can travel and present technical content anywhere.

3. My June Trip to Vermont.Net

In June, on the Monday after Tech Ed 2012 in Orlando, I travelled to Burlington, Vermont to speak to the Vermont.Net user group. This was my first “INETA trip” to speak to a user group. I flew out of JFK airport in New York, landed in Burlington and took a brief walking tour of some of town. After an ice-cream at Ben + Jerry’s, I rode to the user group meeting in nearby Winooski. My topic for this meeting was a (very brief) introduction to the concepts of CQRS architecture. I was nervous that evening, and rambled through the complex content a bit fast for my own liking. After some re-enforcing words of confidence from some of the attendees like Julie Lerman, Rachel Reese, and Rob Hale as well as some of the other attendees, I felt confident that I could do this type of travel and speaking again.

It was at this point, that I decided to give the autumn code camp circuit a try. I booked my September event to Code Camp NYC, the September monthly meeting at Philly.Net, and Vermont Code Camp. These three events in 6 days were an amazing confidence booster to me, one that I will never forget.

Honorable Mention – Vermont Code Camp

After I submitted my talk for September at Vermont Code Camp, I arranged for it to be a nice vacation weekend with my wife. I sent the kids off to my parents for the weekend and found a nice hotel to stay at. What was most amazing for me about this weekend was not just the time I had to wander around Vermont with my wife, but the speaker dinner on the evening of the event.

Here I was, at a dinner table with these other volunteers and personalities from the .Net community, and my wife was along for the ride. I was entirely shocked and pleased with how quickly my colleagues welcomed my wife and the conversations that continued well into the late evening. A special thank you to Mike Jones, Julie Lerman, and Kathleen Dollard for a great evening of conversation. My wife will never forget discussing hiking boots in Ben + Jerry’s with Julie and Kathleen, one of those cool personal moments that this community has enthralled me with.

2. Speaker Idol at Tech Ed 2012

In May, after my trip to Tech Ed was approved by my employer, I got this crazy idea: Is there going to be a “Speaker Idol” competition at Tech Ed? If there is, why couldn’t I enter?

After a flurry of emails to the organizers, some of which I’m sure made me look like a stalker, I got my invite. They knew of me, and offered me a slot to speak on the first day of competition. I was absolutely thrilled with the opportunity, and was ready to face the judges and whatever issues may come. I worked for a week straight getting content about my qUnitMetro project ready. Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 were in beta testing, so I would be demonstrating something that NO ONE had seen before. I could break new ground and set myself apart as a knowledge leader… I tuned and tweaked, wrote blog posts, wrote sample code and slides. A week’s worth of sleepless nights to test and verify and get ready for a competition that COULD put me on the map, gain me significant notoriety in this community in a very short amount of time.

And then it happened… 4 days before Tech Ed, Microsoft released a new beta version of Windows 8. They were so generous in their beta testing release schedule, they released a new version of Visual Studio on the same day.

On this day my local user group was hosting a prominent speaker who was in Philadelphia for one night only. I didn’t take that evening to investigate the new Windows release, but instead attended the guest speaker’s lecture at a local community college. I swapped phone numbers with him, and asked for a few minutes of his time to discuss my talk for Speaker Idol. He was very generous with his time, and I can not thank him enough. It’s my hope that as a Developer Evangelist for Telerik that I can meet this example he set forth for me.

The next evening, I did my download of the new Windows 8 and Visual Studio code. It was then that my heart sank… My code didn’t work, my samples were invalid. I had to verify everything I had written up to that point. qUnitMetro needed to be reviewed, my samples for the Speaker Idol demo had to be verified… all in the course of 3 days.

After 2 days, a case of Mountain Dew, and a bit of cursing at my unknown Windows developer friends at Microsoft, I got my content straightened out. I realized the problems were my own, and got myself set to go for Orlando – site of Tech Ed 2012.

You can search this blog for a thorough retelling of how Speaker Idol went for me. I was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning, awaiting the experience. I spent so much valuable time at Tech Ed with a significant number of community leaders, and really felt like I was stepping up my game as a speaker. I got the buzz.. and was so comfortable on stage, that I started to really embrace the speaker experience.

Over the following month, I was on several podcasts and interviewed by CodeProject.com to discuss qUnitMetro. It was a great leap for me, and little did I know where it was going to take me. Several of the judges and a significant number of my friends who worked at Telerik saw my presentation at Tech Ed and were impressed. Little did I know that this would be the first step in my next adventure with my career.

1. Shipped the First Version of a New Web Application

If you’ve stayed with me through this detail of personal drivel, then I thank you.

I’ve made my number one event over the past year the shipment of production code, the launch of a new software-as-a-service web application. This was a product that I had designed from scratch. We were embarking on the use of dynamic view models, HTML5 offline-mode, and the use of NoSQL databases. We were trying new technologies that were supposed to help solve the business problems my application had.

Any time you ship code no matter how small it is, is a very big thing. If customers are using code you wrote, that’s a very big thing. If you write code and no one (including you) learns from it, no one is using it, or no one is paying you for it, you are wasting your time.

I’m proud of the team that I led that launched this application. We spent many long evenings getting it working properly, and were happy with how it ran. We were a scrum team that ran very well within all of the definitions of the scrum process. Our innovations even led the organization to file a patent based on my designs. That patent application is still pending today.

Conclusion

That’s it.. a whirlwind 2012 experience. I end the year working for a new company that is recognized around the world. I’m writing more and more technical content in blogs for you in the developer community. Next up: my resolutions for 2013 – What exactly can I accomplish in 2013?