As some of you may have noticed, I've updated my blog badges for some of the upcoming events. However, there are also other events going on that I will not be attending due to other commitments, but I want to get the word out about them as well. So what's happening over the next few months? (Note: There are a lot of events going on, so I am splitting this into two posts.)

Central Ohio Day of .NET (April 18, 2009)

The Day of .NET season opens this year with Central Ohio Day of .NET, down in Wilmington, OH. For those of you not familiar with a Day of .NET, it's typically a day-long event covering various topics that would interest .NET developers and those getting started with .NET.

This year's topics include Lean with Kanban, CSS, XAML, SQL 2008, Powershell, object-oriented programming, patterns, Javascript, WPF, dependency injection, testing, Ruby and Rails for the .NET developer, Office development, and Sharepoint.

I will be giving my "Intro to the New Data Types in SQL 2008" talk.

For more information on Central Ohio Day of .NET, check out their site at: http://www.cinnug.org/cododn.

Kalamazoo X Conference (April 25, 2009)

As developers, we tend to go to conferences to learn about new technologies and languages - like Silverlight, MVC, WPF, and F#. But there's more to being a developer besides writing programs, and most developers tend to forget this.

My friends up in Kalamazoo have put together a conference called the Kalamazoo X Conference that address these other things tha we forget as a developer. There is a track for Soft Skills - including branding, measured innoveation, social networking, and the famous Soft Skills talk. Another track focuses on architecture/design/process - including unit testing, Kanban and Lean, patterns, and how to improve your development process. One of the things I get asked about by some of my colleagues is how to improve their UI and UX, and yes, these guys included a track for UX/design - which includes the process of designing, the art of simplicity, and tips for improving UX. Finally, there's the career development track - including change, organizational dynamics, effective customer communication, and leadership 101.

So take a break from the languages and techniques, and come out and see these other skills that we need to have and hone as developers.

I will be giving the talk on social networking and how to use the various sites effectively.

For more information on the Kalamazoo X Conference, check out their site at: http://www.kalamazoox.org/.

Stir Trek (May 8, 2009)

A few of my friends had the opportunity to attend MIX09, and now they're bringing the MIX content to our region. Some things that are getting covered include Silverlight 3, ASP.NET 4.0, Internet Explorer 8, Azure, SketchFlow, and WPF 4. Topics are being covered by both nationally-known and regionally-known speakers (including Tim Heuer, Matt Casto, Michael Eaton, Brian Prince, and Steve Smith).

For $25, you get MIX09 content, lunch, a raffle, and a private screening of the new Star Trek movie that opens on May 8. Need to convince your employer to give you the day off? It's a shorter period than MIX, cheaper than MIX, and you'll come back with a look at some of the new technologies that you can use to get ahead of the competition.

So what are you waiting for? Go sign up at: http://www.stirtrek.com/

Ignite Cleveland (May 16, 2009)

The challenge - 20 slides, automatically advancing at 15 seconds each, giving you a total of 5 minutes to get your point across. Are you up to the challenge?

I took the challenge at the inaugural event this past February, and I delivered my "Marketing Your Event Online" pitch. Other talks given included "How to Winterize Your Business", "5 Steps to a Personal Brand", and "Things We Should Do For Our Clients (Even Though We Aren't Getting Paid for Them)".

Once again, Andrew Kavanaugh and Jon Stahl are putting this event together, and it'll be held at LeanDog. After seeing the success of the inaugural event, I have high hopes for this next event. If I didn't have prior commitments, I would definitely be at Ignite Cleveland 2. So what are you waiting for? Got a talk idea? Or maybe not brave enough to talk but want to purchase a ticket and attend? Check out their site for more information at: http://ignitecle.com/.

These are just some of the events that I'm looking forward to in the next couple months. Stay tuned for the next post, where I cover a few more events that are happening this summer!

Labels: Central Ohio Day of .NET, events, Ignite Cleveland, Kalamazoo X

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!

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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