Labels: Jeff Blankenburg, SoS, SUX, TDPE, WiTty Perspectives

Contribupendence Day is coming up this Friday, July 3rd. Are you ready for it?

Wait... you haven't heard of it? Let me explain how it works:

1. Write recommendations for friends and fellow community members.
2. ...
3. Profit!

Ok... maybe there's no profit involved.

Seriously, though, last summer, Jeff Blankenburg came up with this idea. The way he put it was:

A day when we can contribute to our colleagues and friends to improve their online standing. A day when we take advantage of those features of social networks that we always put off until tomorrow. - taken from his post from last year's Contribupendence Day

I've been thinking about this throughout the year, as I wanted to select people that I didn't select last year, and I wanted to diversify my options - not just .NET people.

So this is my challenge to you - participate! If you're not sure what to do, check Jeff's post from last year and it should give you an idea of what it's about.

Labels: Contribupendence Day, Jeff Blankenburg

This past Saturday, I attended Central Ohio Day of .NET. I spent a lot of the time running around, but despite missing a couple sessions, I really enjoyed the event.

A Friendly Game of Tag

Jeff Blankenburg had the fun idea of a Microsoft Tag scavenger hunt at Central Ohio Day of .NET, and he recruited me to help out with this event. Saturday morning, I had the stack of tags and surveyed the conference center for good spots to put the tags. Jeff and I had talked the night before about some potential spots, and that gave me ideas to run with. While he wrote up the hints, I was getting them in place. Special thanks to the guy who placed the tags in the Open Spaces room and on the open spaces board.

We had quite a few participants, and the scavenger hunt was done by about 11am, when Alex Moore came by and told Jeff the winning phrase - in a Ballmeresque way, he had to say "Developers! Developers! Developers!". There was great timing all around - Jeff and I were talking with some of the guys in the hall, including Andy Erickson, when we saw Alex and Steve Wallace heading towards the last stage. Andy put together last year's video recap and caught Alex's message - so let's hope he uses it in this year's recap!

We plan on doing a more challenging Tag scavenger hunt at another event later this summer, so keep an eye out for the Tags!

Intro to the New Data Types in SQL 2008

My SQL 2008 data types talk has made its second appearance at a Day of .NET. Some of the things that were covered included:

• Using date and time as separate fields, with the music collection example.


• Offsets are not time zones.


• FILESTREAMs extend SQL 2008 into the NTFS file system, related relational data to files.

My slide deck is available here.

TDD in T-SQL

This was the only other presentation that I sat through in its entirety. I had been hearing about TDD for quite awhile and had seen it in Python, Ruby, and Java. So it was about time that I saw TDD with a language that I use in my day job.

Phil Japikse presented on why to use TDD in general and then showed us what it took to do TDD with T-SQL. He used the T-SQL Test Tool, available through CodePlex. This tool works on SQL 2005 and higher.

I look forward to downloading it and testing it here at home to get a feel for TDD in T-SQL.

Thanks to...

This event was made possible by a lot of people, so I wanted to take the time to thank them here.

Sponsors

Without the sponsors, this event could not have been free to the attendees. Sponsors are the ones who provide the swag and financial support to cover costs like the venue, badges, programs, and any other incidentals. This year's sponsors were Microsoft, MAX Technical Training, DevExpress, Redgate, CBTS, Triune Group and SDS.

Speakers

The speakers bring the content to the event, sharing their interest on topics that you may be able to apply in the workplace. We had speakers from as far as Michigan and Tennessee. Thanks to all the speakers who came out and shared their passion for technology with the community.

Attendees

Without the attendees, the event wouldn't have a reason to happen. But we know there are people out there who want to learn more on .NET and who want to add to their technical toolbox. People traveled from all over for the event - it was amazing to see almost 200 people together for this event. If you attended, I hope you at least learned something new and were able to take home some nuggets of knowledge that you could put to work.

Organizers and Volunteers

And last but not least, I'd like to thank the organizers - Mike Wood, Jim Holmes, Carey Payette, Justin Kohnen, Bob Sledge, Matt Rigling and Chris Barth - and their crew of volunteers. Putting a successful event together takes just the right team, and this group had a successful team that kept the event running smoothly. Thanks for putting so much time and effort into bringing this event to the community!

I really enjoyed this year's event, and I look forward to some of the other Days of .NET that are yet to come.

Labels: Alex Moore, Central Ohio Day of .NET, Jeff Blankenburg, Microsoft Tag, SQL 2008 data types, T-SQL Test Tool

Many moons ago, I was a Girl Scout, collecting badges for my sash in Brownies and then for my vest in Juniors. But once the troop dissolved, I stopped earning badges.

Here I am decades later, now collecting badges on my blog's sidebar. So what's the deal with the badges? Here we go:



This isn't a badge, although it appears with my badges. This is one of the Microsoft Tags that I've created, and I will unpassword it when the timing is right. For a very informative post on Microsoft Tag and some of its capabilities, check out Jeff Blankenburg's post on Microsoft Tag.



On Saturday, February 28th, I will be speaking at the first Ignite Cleveland. With an Ignite event, you have 20 slides, 15 seconds each, for a total of 5 minutes. The title of my talk is "Marketing Your Event Online". In my 5 minutes, I will be showing some of the tools to market events online - including Eventful, CrowdVine, Meetup, and Twitter. While showing off the tools, I will be mentioning effective ways of using them and some of the local companies that are using these tools. I've been mentioning this event on Cleveland Tech Events and as clevtechevents on Twitter.



On Sunday, March 29th, I will be in Chicago, speaking about IronPython at PyCon. I'm looking forward to hearing some of the Python and IronPython talks, and I look forward to meeting more people there.



On Saturday, April 18th, I will be in Wilmington, Ohio for Central Ohio Day of .NET. I've submitted talks on Iron Python, SQL 2008 data types, and XAML, but their call for speakers is open a bit longer, so I won't know if any of the talks will be accepted for awhile yet. I know of another IronPython talk being submitted by Darrell Hawley, and if both of our talks get accepted, I'd recommend checking them both out - I'm hoping to do a "look at the cool things you can do with IronPython" kind of talk, whereas he's hoping to showing off some of the tools to use with it and how to get into debugging and stuff.

Even if my talks don't get accepted, I plan on being at Central Ohio Day of .NET and hope to see you there!

---

If you want to hear me talk on anything, check out my list of presentation abstracts. IronPython, databases in general, and social networking are the main things that I like talking about, but I'm always looking into new technology and may add more to my list of interests. Drop me an email at sarah at codinggeekette dot com if you want to hear me speak!

Labels: badges, Central Ohio Day of .NET, Ignite Cleveland, Jeff Blankenburg, Microsoft Tag, PyCon

Tomorrow is the start of my first CodeMash experience, at the Precompiler. There are so many tutorials that I want to check out, but I will mostly be hiding out in the CodeJam.

It all started in 2007, when my buddy Russ from work told me about CodeMash. He's gone to past CodeMashes, and whenever he talks about it, his excitement gets to me. I didn't meet him in time for 2007, but he could have talked me into 2008. However, I also was uncertain of my vacation time and how I would handle taking time off with my husband. Lame excuses, I know... but I didn't go to CodeMash in 2008.

Of course, I met more people who reminded me of my epic fail - including Jeff Blankenburg, Mike Eaton, Michael Letterle, and Joe O'Brien. Thanks to the push from all of these guys (and all the others who helped), I made it a point to set the dates aside. But I had talked with one of my friends earlier in the year, and he had figured that I'd go and enjoy my first year as an attendee and worry about presenting there the following year. As much as that sounded like a good idea, I knew better - it was pretty much expected that I'd submit talks for it.

So it's my first CodeMash, and I am going as an event co-lead (CodeJam), presenter (IronPython), and attendee. Thanks to my friends for encouraging me to attend. I've been looking forward to it for the past few months, and it's finally here.

If you are there and you see me, come up and introduce yourself! I look forward to meeting you there!

Labels: CodeMash, Coding Geekette, Jeff Blankenburg, Joe O'Brien, Michael Letterle, Mike Eaton

So Jeff wrote a blog post wondering "What's in Your Quick Launch Bar?". It's definitely interesting to see what other people have in their Quick Launch bar, if they even use it.

I sometimes use mine, but I have a nice keyboard at work that I can bind keys to programs, so I don't use my Quick Launch at work much. Now my personal laptop, on the other hand, doesn't have that functionality, so I end up using the Quick Launch more often.

So... what's in my Quick Launch bar?

• Switch between windows: After this post, it'll get removed. It must be stock down there, but I don't use it. Alt-Tab is good enough for me.


• Windows Live Mail: I check most of my email accounts through Windows Live Mail. I started playing with it one day and have just kind of stuck with it.


• Digsby: I use this to keep track of all of my IMs, Twitter, and Facebook. Two AOL IM accounts, 1 ICQ account, 1 Facebook, and 1 Twitter... and a partridge in a pear tree.


• Microsoft Office Outlook: Yes, I know... two mail clients in there. Outlook keeps track of specific email, my appointments, and my phone contacts.


• Microsoft SharedView: I originally installed it after seeing people talk about it on Twitter, and I've used it to help one of my buddies learn PHP programming. I really like this tool, as it helps to see what the other person is working on.


• Spybot Search & Destroy: Not so much a problem anymore, but I used to use Spybot to keep out pesky spyware.


• Apple Safari: On those days where I just get tired of IE 8 and its quirks... and get tired of telling sites to run in compatibility mode... then I switch to Safari for Windows.


• Subcommander Beta: This is a SVN client that I was looking into. I haven't had enough time to comment either way.

I try to keep a lot out of my Quick Launch, as I don't like it cluttered. Then again, I tend to do a lot of keying rather than mousing, so I'm more likely to key Windows key-R, notepad, Enter than click the icon in Quick Launch.

As for my hot keys at work, they are:

• Visual Studio 2008


• Internet Explorer


• Firefox 3


• Safari for Windows


• Opera

Looking at a list like that, you'd think I'm a web developer or something like that. Oh wait... I am.

So... what's in your Quick Launch?

Labels: Jeff Blankenburg, Quick Launch

For those of you who've seen Brian Prince's "Soft Skillz" talks, you'll know that politics is one of those topics that shouldn't be talked about among certain audiences. However, Jeff Blankenburg has decided to hold a contest that deals with politics.

MSNBC has a neat WPF app that you can use to make predictions for this year's election. Jeff is holding a contest to see who'll have the closest predictions. You could win a Zune, Visual Studio 2008, or even Vista Ultimate. If you want to know more about his contest, check out his blog post on it!

Labels: Brian H. Prince, Jeff Blankenburg, MSNBC, politics, WPF

How many of you are familiar with Live Mesh? If you aren't familiar with it, you should check it out. Better yet, go check out Jeff Blankenburg's blog, as he enjoys talking about Live Mesh.

Or better yet... come on out to the next Greater Cleveland PC Users Group VB.NET/C# SIG meeting, this coming Thursday, October 30th, where you can hear Jeff talk of the awesomeness known as Live Mesh.

• What: GCPCUG VB.NET/C# SIG Meeting on Live Mesh


• Where: Beacon Place Auditorium, Beacon Place Office Building, Lower Level, 6055 Rockside Woods Blvd, Independence, OH 44131
  
• When: Thursday, October 30th, 6:30-8:30pm

If you are planning on attending, please check out their site and contact them so that they have a good idea of how much food they'll need to order.

For those of you who follow the SIGs, this group does go out after their meetings, over to the Winking Lizard. So come on out for the meeting and come out to socialize afterwards! Hope to see you there!

Labels: .NET SIG, GCPCUG, Jeff Blankenburg, Live Mesh

I'm going to apologize ahead of time for the lack of code and technical blog posts. I've been working on presentations for a couple upcoming events, and I'm looking forward to a lot of others. So, what're the tech events that are coming up?

ArcReady/MSDN Unleashed

Every now and then, there are Microsoft events that make their way to Cleveland. ArcReady and MSDN Unlimited are two of those events, and together they make a day of the event. These events are coming to Cleveland this Thursday, October 9th. ArcReady is in the morning, and MSDN Unleashed will be in the afternoon. This event is being held at the Microsoft office in Independence. Check out ArcReady registration and MSDN Unleashed registration for more details.

Ohio North SQL SIG Meeting

Allen White has posted the October agenda for the Ohio North SQL SIG meeting on his blog. This month's meeting is this Thursday, October 9th. This group meets the 2nd Thursday of the month at the Microsoft office in Independence.

Bennett Adelson-sponsored .NET SIG Meeting

The Bennett Adelson-sponsored .NET SIG meeting will go over jQuery on Tuesday, October 14th. This group meets the 2nd Tuesday of the month at the Microsoft office in Independence.

Ann Arbor Day of .NET

I'm looking forward to Ann Arbor Day of .NET for many reasons. Most of all, I'm looking forward to seeing my friends again. I'm also presenting on the SQL 2008 data types. For those who saw my presentation last month, this is not the same presentation. I've taken parts from that presentation and expanded the talk a bit more to get into FILESTREAM.

Ann Arbor Day of .NET is being held on Saturday, October 18th at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For those who attended Ann Arbor GiveCamp, this event is at the same campus.

This event is FREE to attend, but registration is advised, as this event will fill up. So register today!

Software Freedom Day

What is Free Software? Do businesses really use it? What are the benefits of it versus the costs of it? Come out and see sessions on various aspects of FOSS and other Free Software concepts at Software Freedom Day on Monday, October 27th, at the Gemini Center in Fairview Park (Cleveland-area). I'll be speaking on python and all of its goodness. For more information, check out their website at: http://www.softwarefreedomday-cleveland.org/. Hope to see some of you there!

.NET University

Jim Holmes and Jeff Blankenburg have gathered some of the speakers from the community to put on this introduction to .NET that's being held down in Columbus on Saturday, November 8th. If you know of any junior developers or even developers who are just getting acquainted with .NET, this event is definitely for them. Check out Jim's entry on it or go straight to the registration page! (Hurry up and register - as there weren't many seats left from what Jeff said.)

---

If you have an event going on that you want me to blog about, drop me a message and I'll make sure to include it in an upcoming post.

Labels: .NET SIG, .NET University, Ann Arbor Day of .NET, Cleveland tech events, Jeff Blankenburg, Jim Holmes, Software Freedom Day, SQL SIG

As I listen to the .NET Rocks! recorded at devLink, I realized that I haven't recapped my experience. So here we go...

Over August 21-24th, I was down in Tennessee, networking with many developers while attending devLink. This was definitely an interesting experience.

I joined a lot of my Twitter friends on the devLink bus ride down, leaving late Wednesday night. It was great to be running with them again - I love hanging out with them. Unfortunately, the bus we took was meant more for short day trips rather than the long trip from (in my case) Toledo to Nashville. No matter how hard I tried, I just could not get much sleep.

Now if I ever have to run around sleep-deprived, this is the group that I'd prefer to be with. We tend to keep each other going. Since my Thursday was pretty well packed, I knew I had to run around with little chance of sleep. Thursday afternoon, I spent some time with some of the most influential devs in the region and had a great time networking with them. I'm definitely looking forward to the ideas that some of us tossed around, and I'm looking forward to working with these guys on various upcoming events.

Thursday evening, I attended the devLink VIP dinner. I had completed a survey on their site and won a spot from a drawing. It was neat to see so many people there. After the dinner, I floated between the poker gathering thrown by Jeff Blankenburg and the gathering in the hotel bar. My pictures from both of those gatherings can be seen in my devLink pics on Flickr.

Friday, I was still tired, but I wasn't going to let my unbalanced sleep state throw me off completely. After surviving the keynote, I decided to head to the opening circle of open spaces. On my way there, I saw Sirena Benefield - an ITT tech student that Brian Prince brought to the community - at the Microsoft booth. I was able to get her to come with me to the opening circle. Alan Stevens was the open spaces facilitator, and I think he did a great job of getting things rolling. Various topics came out - including community building, how comments are evil, Microsoft and open source, agile practices, Ruby, and even one on suggestions for a university and their computer program.



After the open spaces opening circle, it was lunch time. We had boxed lunches, and I sat with part of the tribe in the open spaces room. That's where I met Mac Fowler, one of the Michigan devLink bus riders. It was nice to enjoy lunch with this group - we get the most random topics whenever we're out.

Friday afternoon, I went to the one session that I wanted to catch that day - Jeff's presentation on Silverlight and some of the cool things that can be done. He covered the 2008 Olympics website, Line Rider, and his own information site.

After that, I took a session off to scope out the conference as a whole. I ended up getting pictures like this one of an open spaces session:



For the last session on Friday, I checked out the open spaces on community. It was great to talk community with this group, as many of them are involved in one form or another. The only thing I didn't like about this open space was that it was at the end of the day. I could see this going further if I hadn't gestured over to Mike Wood that we had to start wrapping it up (since many of us still had to meet the bus shortly after that).

Friday night, there was an attendee party at the hotel. They had Rock Band and Guitar Hero in the game room:



They also had karaoke going on in another room. Snacks included wings, sandwiches, and some other things. There were supposed to be contests going on, but I didn't stay for the whole thing. I ended up running around with a bunch of friends for awhile and then hung out in the lobby chatting for quite a bit afterwards.

I was torn about what I wanted to do on Saturday - the open spaces topics were tempting, but there were a couple talks that I wanted to catch as well. After talking with Jeff McWherter (he who got me my "VBA ALL THE WAY" shirt), I skipped his talk and went to Sara Ford's open space on Microsoft and open source. Having been exposed to open source and the image of the Evil Empire while in my linux days, I was curious to see how this open space would go. It definitely was interesting to see how people got into open source and why some do not. There's definitely a change in Microsoft in who they are now and where they are with open source than what it was in the late 90s, and it's good to see them going the way they are.

In the second slot, I could have seen Brian's Soft Skillz talk again - this time with cake! It was his birthday, so he celebrated with cake in his presentation. (No, the cake wasn't a lie.) However, I went to the other presentation that Brian was supposed to give at the same time - the presentation that he and Jeff Blankenburg did for the launch event. Now I had heard about this presentation plenty of times before, but the launches in my area conflicted with some of my go-live dates, so I missed it. I'm glad I caught this presentation - I learned a bit more with Visual Studio 2008. For example, did you know that if you had the Intellisense dropdown up but needed to see behind it, you could press the Ctrl key and the Intellisense dropdown would go transparent? It was nice to see the Apply Styles dialog, which shows just how the CSS class would look. Of course, the sexiness known as AJAX happened to get mentioned as well - who thought a cleaning agent would be labeled sexy? ;)

We had another day of boxed lunches, and after lunch, I ended up checking out James Bender's intro to WCF presentation. I work a little with web services, but I'd love to learn more about WCF, since that's the way web services are going. What I loved about this presentation is that James uses a simple example that everyone can relate to. He explains concepts using people in the audience as an example. This was a presentation where I actually didn't get lost and feel over my head in (as I usually end up feeling with WCF talks).

There must have been something with the 2:30pm sessions, as once again I took time off to take pictures of the conference and to call home and sing "Happy Birthday" to my mom. After that, I caught some of the closing circle of open spaces.

The last session of the conference was our closing keynote with Joe Stagner from Microsoft. After his talk, the devLink team did giveaways - and two of the bigger prizes were won by fellow devLink bus mates.

After the conference wrapped up, we headed back to the hotel to eat and then load the bus and head home. The bus ride home was okay - I managed to get some sleep (after hitting the point of being desperate for sleep) and was awoken by Mike Eaton on the ride home, who let me know that the bus blew a tire. We were about an hour away from Cincinnati and ended up having to wait 4 hours before we could get back on the road again. If ever I had to get stuck on the road with a group, I'd hope it'd be this group. We continued our random discussions and waited while they replaced the tire. The only other headache about getting home was our ride from Columbus to Toledo by way of Cleveland/Sandusky. Either we had the case of a lame GPS or the driver just wasn't paying attention... either way, we got back to Toledo-ish a bit later than usual.

Overall, I am glad I had the opportunity to go on this trip. I went with the goal to meet new people and maybe learn new things. I managed to do both, and now I have even more people that I can talk with. I'm definitely looking forward to devLink 2009!

Labels: Alan Stevens, Brian H. Prince, devLink, Heartland Open Spaces, James Bender, Jeff Blankenburg, Jeff McWherter, Mike Eaton, open source, open spaces, Sara Ford, Sirena Benefield

Thanks to last minute notice from Jeff Blankenburg, I'm putting together a last minute geek dinner here in Cleveland. So... if you're interested, please either DM me on Twitter, IM me on AIM, email me at sarah at codinggeekette dot com, or leave me a comment here on this blogpost by 1pm Eastern time so that I can have a headcount.

When: Tomorrow, Friday, July 25th @ 5:00pm
Where: El Jalapenos, W 117th, West side of Cleveland

Like I said, I know this is super short notice. But... in case you see this and are interested, please let me know!

Labels: Cleveland, El Jalapenos, geek dinner, Jeff Blankenburg

So another Internet meme is making its rounds... and here's how I got it:

Josh Holmes > Michael Eaton > Sarah Dutkiewicz



The questions I have to answer are:

Who has inspired you and how?
What have they inspired you to do?
Who else have they inspired?

There are two guys who came to my mind when I initially thought about this post, and since Mike talked of two guys, I'm going to talk about two of my sources of inspiration as well.

When I graduated from college, I came back to a fairly dead technology market in Cleveland. I ended up answering an ad placed in the local newspaper and got into tech support. A few months after being at the internet service provider, they brought in a new postmaster (Martin Hebrank). Since I did a lot of running between departments, I would stop and chat with Martin every now and then.

Just talking with him and seeing the various things that he worked on outside of mail server stuff (like his work with NOOSS) inspired me to keep up on my programming skills even though my job didn't use it.

Martin has been good at encouraging me on checking things out and staying up on my programming skills. When he heard about my IronPython presentation this past May, he emailed me and sent me links to PyOhio, ClePy, and other python resources.

I have no idea for sure who else he may have inspired, but hopefully they are as enthusiastic and chaotic as us!

---

As I mentioned, there were two guys who came to mind. Martin was my source of inspiration at the ISP. After the ISP, I disappeared into the void known as the 80% and out of the realms of influence. When working in manufacturing, it's easy to fall out of the sphere of influence where the 20% live. After falling in the 80% and hitting a dead end, I knew it was time to follow my heart and get back into programming. So I accepted my current developer job, and thanks to my buddy Russ, I started going to user groups.

Now going to user groups is something that people in the 20% do, but the overachiever in me wanted to come out and do more. However, I didn't see much there that I could do - nothing at that point could inspire me to get involved more. Little did I realize that going to user groups would lead me to another source of inspiration.

At the December user group meeting, Jeff Blankenburg came up and showed us his presentation of cool stuff. Some of the things he showed us really caught my attention, so I looked at them later when I got home. His excitement for technology came across in this presentation, and it had me wondering more. So I read his blog, wondering who this guy was and why he seemed so excited about technology.

In the beginning, there was Twitter. From there, I somehow ended up meeting a lot of people. Then, he mentioned that he read my blog. At that point, I realized that I probably should setup a technical blog - hence how this site came to be. And apparently I hadn't mentioned it once it was setup, because once he found it, he told me that I needed to talk about it more. Then, there was Central Ohio Day of .NET and the poker event afterwards. This poker newbie wasn't sure about it, but he talked me into that too. And the inspiration continued from there...

As quiet and reserved as I tend to be, Jeff somehow saw through all of that. He's been a great source of inspiration and encouragement, and I look forward to seeing what I'll be inspired to do next.

As for inspiring others, maybe he inspired John to get more into Silverlight? I don't know for sure, but the more he gets his name out there, the more chances he has to inspire others.

These guys have a strong passion for technology, and that's what caught my attention and inspired me. They're incredibly brilliant and know how to present technical stuff while keeping it exciting. It's gotten me this far, and I plan on running with this as far as it will take me.

Call to Action

But all this inspiration here makes me wonder... who inspires them? And for some of my Tweeps, who inspires you? So I'm tagging these 5 people to write their "Inspired By" posts:

Jeff Blankenburg

Jennifer Marsman

John Stockton

Joe Fiorini

Mark Gilbert (his response)

Labels: inspiration, inspire, inspired by, Jeff Blankenburg, Martin Hebrank

As I was told, July 3^rd was Contribupendence Day. So the challenge was to write 5 recommendations on {insert social networking site name here}. Like James Bender, as soon as I started writing them, my list started to grow. So I have my first five done, and I have quite a few more on my list that I want to tackle throughout this weekend.

So, in no particular order, the 5 recommendations I wrote on Plaxo were:

• Mike Eaton:Whether it's an idea for a presentation, an event, or even for a program, Mike is extremely enthusiastic about technology and knows how to turn an idea into a reality. He's quite involved with planning events for the developer community, and if he hears a good idea, he's one of the first to volunteer to help out. He's also making his rounds as a speaker, and his presentations are practical and easy to follow. I look forward to seeing more of his presentations and attending his events.


• Joe Fiorini: Working with Joe on planning a technology conference, I was extremely pleased at how well he was willing to step up with a little direction. Joe has a lot of passion for technology, which drives him to getting involved in such things as Cleveland Startup Drinks and Cleveland Ruby Brigade. I am incredibly honored to have worked with someone with as much passion and promise as Joe.


• Mike Letterle: I was quite excited to work with Mike on the development of the website for a technology conference that we helped plan. Whether we were looking at adding features or trying to get things more unified, Mike was definitely willing to take anything on. Mike also has an interest in the Ruby language and would be one of those people who could convince others to switch to Ruby with his interest in the language.


• John Stockton: I was honored to work under John's leadership when planning a tech conference. John made sure that we'd meet our deadlines to pull off a successful event. I've also watched him give a presentation. John gears his presentations so that his audience can easily follow them. He's well-informed and his passion will take him far.


• Jeff Blankenburg: From seeking out others who share his love of technology to bringing us together and truly putting the "unity" in community, Jeff is an invaluable asset to the developer community. Whether he's blogging, presenting, or just getting a group together, he continues to provide us with opportunities to network and go far in our careers. His contagious enthusiasm is what reawakened my passion for technology. I've learned quite a bit from him, and I look forward to seeing where he will lead us...

I'm looking forward to posting the rest of these recommendations. Thanks to Jeff for coming up with this idea!

Labels: Contribupendence Day, James Bender, Jeff Blankenburg, Joe Fiorini, John Stockton, Michael Letterle, Mike Eaton, Plaxo

Jeff Blankenburg had a Blankenthought today about the developer community, what your peers think of you, and how the social networking sites out there that let us review each other are pretty empty. So, he's come up with a Blankenholiday called Contribupendence Day.

If you're on any social networking site out there where you can review your peers (like LinkedIn and Plaxo), you should participate in this holiday. And if you're not on them, then get on them and join in on this celebration of the developer community.

Go read Jeff's post on how to take part in Contribupendence Day 2008!

Labels: Blankenholiday, community, Contribupendence Day, Jeff Blankenburg, social networking

So there's a new podcast in town called Deep Fried Bytes, and it's put out by Keith Elder and Chris Woodruff. As they descrive it, it's an audio talk show with a Southern flavor. I heard about it from Jeff Blankenburg's blog, and although I'm not typically one to listen to podcasts, I figured I'd check it out.

Their intro podcast definitely had me wanting more, and I checked out Episode 2: Interview War Stories. There were a couple of things that came up that I really have to comment on, so if you haven't heard the podcast, stop reading and go listen to it. Otherwise, continue on.

Overall, I really enjoyed the podcast. It was interesting to hear other people's perspectives on interviewing and interviews. From interviewing people for who they are (versus SAT questions) to making people cry in interviews to some randomness on chickens, the podcast goes across the board.

Throughout my past experiences, I've gone through all sorts of interviews. The most intensive interview involved a test of SAT questions (as Brian Prince called them in the podcast), a test of scenarios to put my knowledge in practice, and for those of us in the top 3, we ended up having to meet with the committee that was filling the position. There were probably 6 people on the committee, including the head of the computing services group. I wasn't chosen, but to make it in the top 3 for the university position (and to beat out a guy who had the position but left and wanted to come back) was definitely an experience worth going through. I knew a couple of people on the committee, including one who was my boss at the time. He actually had encouraged me to apply, since I was graduating that semester and it would've been a way to keep me there. I had also worked with another guy on the committee (who would've been the reporting manager for the position they were filling), doing some white hat work, so he was well aware of my work ethic and my technical abilities.

One of the more fun interviews I had was right out of college. The final question stuck out in my mind. "If you were a Muppet, which would you be?" For a technical position, it seemed to be a question totally out of the park, and it took me by surprise. But I answered it, and then shortly after, I joined the team. About a month in, I asked my boss why she asked that question, and she said that it's her question on judging a person's character. She had Muppet personalities associated with everyone on the team, and she wanted to make sure that my Muppet personality would fit well with their blend. Apparently they needed a "Statler and Waldorf", otherwise they wouldn't have brought me on.

Now in the many interviews I've been through, I've been lucky enough to not have an interviewer make me cry. They talked about that in the podcast, and it really irritated me that the one guy said he wanted to be "that guy" - the one to make an interviewee cry. Seriously, why would you want to have that reputation? That just seems purely asinine to me, but then again, I'm not the kind of person who'd want to make an interviewee cry.

So yeah, as much as I'm not one for the "all talk" nature of podcasts, I think I might stick with this one, as my discussions with friends have definitely got me wondering more about these guys.

Labels: Chris Woodruff, Deep Fried Bytes, interview, Jeff Blankenburg, Keith Elder, Muppets, podcasts

If any of you follow Amanda Laucher (pandamonial on Twitter), you may have seen her comment about meeting someone who didn't know about their MS evangelists. I have to admit - I had no idea of these people called evangelists until just this last December.

Living Under a Rock

When you work for a small company that really doesn't use new technologies nor hears about it, you never realize that you're outside the realm of influence. The only reason why I knew about C# was because my buddy G and I were talking about how we'd never need to know it as long as we were at that company. I remember the discussion clearly, and to this day, G's still there and not using much in the way of .NET (other than probably maintaining my small VB.NET app). Meanwhile, I moved on to a smaller company, bigger technical staff, and am using C# and having fun learning new technologies. There we were, the developers (yep, just the 2 of us) for a manufacturing company of 600+ people, not knowing of all the resources available to us.

Developer Evangelist?

I imagine that if my buddy Russ hadn't mentioned the .NET SIG, I wouldn't have thought to look to see what else is out there. Even so, going to the SIG meetings apparently wasn't enough, as I had been going to the meetings since May 2007, shortly after I started my current job, but still had no idea that there were these people called evangelists. I wouldn't hear about them until December 2007, when this guy Jeff Blankenburg came to the Bennett Adelson SIG and showed us some cool stuff from Microsoft (like Popfly). He mentioned that he is a developer evangelist for the region. At that point, I had to wonder what it was they did. After prodding Russ for more details, I learned that there was some other guy who would come along rarely but apparently not much else happened here in Cleveland. Still, there wasn't much that I could find out from Russ on what a developer evangelist did.

So, some of us lived under rocks or were just out of the realm of influence with the evangelists. (SIGs too far, no evangelists geared for the industry, etc.) If you know people who are left out, mention this post to them, as the Microsoft evangelists (at least those here in the Heartland District) are just an awesome team to meet!

So what do evangelists do?

Before I get into the "who", you need to know what they do.

Just as the title suggests, they evangelize! Seriously, though, they're developers, architects, and other tech-minded individuals who get to hear about the cool stuff ahead of time and make sure that we know about it. Tools and technologies, they're seeing just what the industry has in store, where things are going, and they tell us about it. Through presentations at user groups and events, blog entries, podcasts, videos, forums, and just being themselves and talking about the things they're passionate about, the evangelists get the word out.

Who are our evangelists?

Ohio is in the Heartland District, which happens to have quite active evangelists in the area. Since I'm a dev, I'm going to mention the developer evangelists first - Jeff Blankenburg and Jennifer Marsman. If you're a dev and reading my blog, you ought to read their blogs as well! Jeff's blog may be slow at the moment, as he's out until the end of May, but definitely stay tuned to his blog when he returns, as you never know what he'll blog about - from something about Silverlight to the after-party of a .NET event or a contest for swag at Codemash, his blog covers all sorts of things, some .NET related and some just regular blog entries. Jennifer just started her blog at the beginning of April and has returned to our region after a few months on leave. Something that Jennifer's doing in her blog is featuring women in technology on her Friday entries. Definitely check out her blog as well!

Then there are the architect evangelists. We used to have Josh Holmes as an architect evangelist for the Heartland District, but he recently was promoted to Central RIA evangelist. Josh is one of the guys from Code to Live, and although he has a bigger region now, he still comes around to the Heartland area events. Our new architect evangelist is Brian H. Prince. I can't comment on the architect coverage, as I'm not an architect, but I definitely recommend checking out Brian's blog even if you aren't an architect. He talks of cool technologies like LiveMesh, robots, and even these things known as "soft skills".

There are other evangelists in the area, but I've met the 4 that I mentioned, and I can definitely tell you that these guys (and Jennifer!) are passionate about technology and getting the word out to the community. Sometimes, I think part of their job is to promote the "unity" in "community".

Don't know who your evangelists are? Want to know who the others are in the Heartland area? Meet your local Microsoft Evangelists!

I've sent this info on to my buddy G, so that he's no longer just another dev out of the realm of influence. But there are other devs out there who don't know about these great contacts. So pass this word on and get the word out there, so that they know that there are awesome resources out there for us in the field.

And a shout out to the PA evangelists, especially John McClelland, for getting the word out to their PA followers on Cleveland Day of .NET! Thanks for spreading the word! :)

Labels: Brian H. Prince, evangelism, Jeff Blankenburg, Jennifer Marsman, Microsoft, pandamonial, Twitter

Disclaimer: I am writing this entry from Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 (for Web Developers and Designers). Already I have a problem, as the Title bar is not showing in Blogger like it should. The button text is cut off, and the buttons don't line up properly. This text editor behaves different too - using the <em> tag for italics rather than the <span style="font-style:italic;">. Fair warning that this is probably just the beginning of my irritations with IE 8 beta 1.

I'm calling this post:

IE (h)8

(and I'll go back and edit it in using a more stable browser once I'm done.)

Last week, at MIX08, they released IE 8 beta 1. I wasn't at MIX08, but Jeff Blankenburg was and he blogged a little on it. After reading his post, I figured that I'd at least check it out on both of my computers - my beefy gaming laptop (Windows Vista) and my not-so-beefy, mostly neglected desktop (Windows XP). Both machines behaved similarly, which surprised me a little seeing that they are quite different in their setup.

One of the things that IE 8 is pushing is standards. Now this is a sore topic with me, mostly because they're called "standards", but there hasn't been anything standard about various browsers' implementations of them. It's always appeared to be a "pick and choose" implementation or a "choose your own adventure" implementation. So why they're finally getting on board and trying to implement the whole thing is beyond me. But maybe it's about time the browsers come closer to putting the "standard" in standard.

Viewing various websites through Internet Explorer 8, I had mixed feelings about it. I like that you can easily see where CSS needs tweaking and where people really need to update their code, without really needing to look at the source. I also have to admit that I like the Developer tools. My preferred browser for web development has been Firefox, with the Firebug add-on. The Developer tools in Internet Explorer 8 have that same feel - with the ability to inspect elements just by clicking on them, changing styles with a simple check, or even debugging Javascript. It's nice to see Microsoft taking this route - definitely a step in the right direction.

From a web developer's standpoint, I like that the standards are being enforced a bit closer than before.

But from a user's standpoint, IE 8 just makes me super cranky. I post on various forums, and textareas act really strange. From horrible lag with textareas that use Javascript (but don't lag in IE 7) to not being able to see what I have highlighted, it's frustrating. This is what makes me yell it's abbreviation - "Aieeeeeeee!" These little frustrations are what reminds me of the key word in this release - beta.

If you're a developer or a designer, definitely check it out, as the Developer Tools have enough coolness factor for me to recommend it. However, if you use a lot of forums that use textareas for posting, have another browser on hand just in case you run into the same headaches that I have. And if you want to download it, there's a link to it over in Jeff's post on Dean Hachamovich's IE8 Keynote.

Labels: Developer Tools, IE 8, Jeff Blankenburg

Last week, as I looked at some sites, I kept noticing links to their RSS feeds. Being back in the public-facing web development arena, I figured that I should probably understand the technologies that are out there for me to use. So I contacted my friend Nivex, who I knew had dealt with RSS feeds in the past, as he had mentioned them to me in passing. He was able to explain it to me so that I could understand it.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. They work on subscriptions, and whenever you subscribe to a site's RSS "feed", you can read the site's updates automatically without having to go to the site. If you don't want to see a site's updates anymore, you can simply delete your subscription to the feed, without having to go to the site to unsubscribe.

RSS feeds are read through RSS readers. There are various types of software packages and websites out there to read RSS feeds. Here at home, I use Google Reader, and I use Mobipocket at work. Other readers can be found by searching for the terms "rss reader" or "rss aggregator" or "feed reader".

When I wake up in the morning, there are a few sites that I visit consistently. Since I found the RSS feeds for them, I no longer open each site to see if they've updated or what they've changed to. I can just go to my RSS reader of choice and read the updates there. Granted, some RSS feeds are smaller than others, so I do have to go to the sites when the message is longer than the feed.

The night after I had the RSS conversation with Nivex, Jeff Blankenburg had messaged me, after realizing I had mentioned him here. He had some neat tools to show me, and so I checked them out. A couple tools he had me check out include Google Analytics and Google Alerts. I'll save the details behind them for another entry. But the tool I'm going to focus on is Feedburner.

Whether you've got a blog, podcast, or commercial site, Feedburner can work for you. Feedburner can take your RSS feed and make it work for you. From statistics on how many people read your feed to what kind of reader they use to various statistics found in other web packages (site traffic, referrers, etc.), you can find out all sorts of details about your feed. You can see what search terms people are using to find your site. These are just site statistics and feed statistics.

But wait, there's more! Feedburner can make sure that your feed is accessible to any feed reader application, using their SmartFeed feature. Whether you have mobile readers or people who just read from their desktop or laptop, SmartFeed makes sure their reader can read your feed.

There are various things that can be spliced into your feed - including pictures from Flickr, links to share the data on a variety of social networking sites, and links that are shared from a variety of social networking sites. There are also specialized feed handlers for feeds that deal with events and financial symbols.

Feedburner can work with the Google AdSense program, so if you're making money from AdSense Ads, you can inject those into your feeds as well.

Getting the word out via Feedburner is fairly easy. Burn your feed, and then they have instructions on how to advertise your burned feed on your site, with instructions geared specifically for some common browser packages (including WordPress, Blogger, and TextPad).

My feed for this blog can now be accessed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/CodingGeekette.

Thanks to the talk of RSS and really neat tools with Nivex and Jeff, I've got some ideas as to how I can use them not only for my own advantage but for the company I work for as well. There are a few parts of our site that I can build feeds for that I could easily see as being beneficial. I have to pitch the idea to the company, but I think I could sell them on it.

Check it out - you may have a use for it too!

Labels: Feedburner, feeds, Google Alerts, Google Analytics, Jeff Blankenburg, Nivex, RSS

Recently, the GoF came up in a discussion on Twitter. They were talking of design patterns, and Joel Ross actually had to refer to the book for some reason.

Now to a seasoned programmer, the GoF is well-known. But some programmers out there are not aware of the GoF or their book. They didn't mention it in my data structures classes in college, and we never did look at it in programming paradigms either. For me, I learned about it firsthand at OOPSLA '99.

The GoF was the Gang of Four, referring to the four authors of the book - Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. The GoF is also used in reference to the book, so take the abbreviation in context. The book came out in late 1994, and it was first made available at OOPSLA '94. (Side note: I use the term "was" - sadly, John Vlissides died on Thanksgiving of 2004.)

At OOPSLA '99, the GoF was on trial for crimes against computer science. The trial description can be found at The Show Trial of the Gang of Four For Crimes Against Computer Science panel description. After having spent some of the day coding in Java, a language I was cramming to learn on our off moments, I was glad to get a break and to witness this.

On Wednesday, November 3, 1999, the GoF was found guilty of their crimes. This was probably the best part of OOPSLA '99, in terms of bringing in experts with a great sense of humor. Although I don't remember all of the details of the trial, I do remember John Vlissides kept it interesting. That's what made me curious about the GoF.

After seeing them at OOPSLA, I had to see what their story was. What is a design pattern and why was there such a big deal about it?

A design pattern is a reusable solution to a common software design problem.
Some pattern references can be found here:

• data & object factory (C#/VB.NET)


• Java's J2EE patterns


• AJAX patterns


• Yahoo!'s Pattern Library


• IBM Patterns for e-business

The more I had read about it, the more I wished that they would teach as a followup to a data structures course. The data structures teach the basics - loops, clauses, classes, and other building blocks. A class on design patterns would show just how to use those building blocks in real world applications. Sometimes, you need that extra step to show just how everything comes together.

Then again, it could just be the engineer in me that likes to see building blocks being used to build something in the grand scheme of things.

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Links for this entry were gathered via a collaborative search on Tafiti, which was recommended by Jeff Blankenburg.

Labels: design patterns, Gang of Four, GoF, Jeff Blankenburg, OOPSLA, tafiti, Twitter