P.Day The Blog

I took part in the 2009 Career Day at Dulles Middle School in Sugarland TX, speaking about software development as a "career" specifically and discussing success strategies in general.  I did not know exactly what to expect from middle school students, but I could not have imagined that they would have been as disinterested as they were.

I was paired up with a local entrepreneur from Sugarland.  I thoroughly enjoyed hearing him speak, even if I had to hear what he was saying six times over the course of the day.  We seemed to have immediately hit it off and I was very pleased with the partner they had selected for me.

Most rooms had two people to speak during each 30-40 minutes session.  The sessions were staggered and each one was a different amount of time from the previous one.  Whatever worked in your last discussion would need to be lengthened or shortened depending on the individual session you were participating in at the moment.  Also, the sessions were not in sync with the normal class periods, so regularly during your conversations the bells would go off when the periods would typically begin and end.

That said, it was an enjoyable experience, heightened by the banter between my partner and I.

Before the day arrived, I had contacted the local Developer Evangelist from Microsoft (J. Sawyer) and asked if he could provide some sort of schwag to the students from Microsoft.  He provided me with XBOX 360 games, a Webcam, and a copy of Office 2008 Ultimate, I was shocked.  That said, I only had four items to give out and I would have six sessions of students.  I decided to stop by and purchase a couple of books on software development from Barnes and Noble the night before.

During each session, if a student participated during the discussion, they would be eligible to select a prize from a raffle.  I was expecting to have to deal with several students per session that participated, thinking then that I would raffle off from those participants who would receive the prize.  As it turned out, I was lucky each session to have one participant.  I ended up not giving out anything for two sessions and would not have had to purchase any extra prizes to give out.

This experience has given me a new appreciation for what my Wife goes through as a Middle School Teacher, along with everything else I already knew about the job.  I don't remember being so petulant and disinterested when I was that age, but perhaps I was.

My wife records Oprah every day, typically I will catch snippets here and there as she watches the recorded show in the evening.  Today's Oprah was no exception and in the process I was fortunate enough to catch a pearl of wisdom so simple and so profound it prompted me to write about it.

In short, today's episode was about Breast Cancer.  Oprah had Christina Applegate on, other survivors with a story to tell, those who are still suffering from the disease, and several health professionals.  First Christina was just beautiful and beaming, but you could tell that she was suffering inside, there were many times it seemed as if she was going to breakdown, but she didn't.  I really felt for her and the others on the show.

The snippet that I caught concerned a woman that had been on the show before.  She had contracted breast cancer when she was in her thirties, had beaten it once, and now was suffering again.  This time, the disease had spread to her lungs and her brain.  Oprah asked her what she wanted to share, I'll try and be as accurate as possible with her quote (I'm sorry, I don't even know her name), and she responded "In this country we are so focused on living as long of a life as possible that we overlook the life that we live every single day".

Now, all of us have been told to seize the day in one form or another so many times it is cliche, but this really rang a bell with me as it contrasted the desire we all share for a long life.  Why is it that we want to live so long when we don't really live to our potential with the time that we do have?

I don't have much more to speak of on this topic at the moment, but I wanted to share just that quote and that it had effected me in the way that it did.

After I caught her story, I came back and fired up Google Reader and Tim Ferris had a new blog post.  He showed off his desk and what they are doing over there in Europe in terms of new thinking in corporate environments.  Again, I had a shock to my system.  He has a quote that is on his desk, it reads "Do one thing every day that scares you".

My Brother-in-Law let me know that he had created a web site that he was using as a recruiting tool ( clarkprofessional.com ).  After looking it over I loved it!

I love when people make a bold move.  I have seen many personal sites out there with a resume slapped up for all to see, but this site goes well beyond that, it defines who he is, what he has done, and what he is looking for.  I thought it was brilliant.

If anyone is looking for a Project Manager, do yourself a favor and take a look at the site.

I just received an email that Microsoft's ArcReady and MSDN Unleashed sessions are canceled due to Ike.  I was looking forward to learning the information covered on both of these sessions.  It was bad enough that the storm had to hit on the day that the Houston TechFest was scheduled, but to also miss this opportunity really makes it a whammy for the .NET folks in Houston.

I know that there are much bigger fish to fry in this city, I myself have only had power in my home since Saturday the 20th and according to CenterPoint there are still over a million people in the city without power.  For those of us that would have had the opportunity to get back to work and start learning and collaborating with others at these events, it would have been a refreshing respite from the recent unpleasantness.

Hopefully they will be able to get them rescheduled in the near future.

The past year has seen the setting and forgetting of so many personal goals of mine that it is depressing if I stop and think about it.  One of those goals, regularly writing on my blog, I am making the highest priority and starting with a fresh vigor.

I wish I could blame everything on Hurricane Ike, but it was just a footnote in the challenges I have allowed to take control of achieving the goals I have set for myself. 

The company that I work for still is not fully recovered from the storm and I am looking forward to returning to normalcy at work.  The office and my responsibilities were always something that I could count to have a handle on.  Lately that has not been the case between having to hire almost an entirely new development and analysis team, taking on the management of another team that works on projects I am not involved in, and then there was Ike...

I'm determined not to allow myself to be set back any further than I already have been.

The first step that I am taking is to clarify my priorities.  I have so many at the moment that it would be impossible for me to truly dedicate myself to their achievement.  I am so compulsive and obsessive about what I am into at the moment ( which could change at any moment ) that I cannot pay even the smallest attention to my previous goals and interests until I have ground my current fling into a fine dust and I am absolutely sick of it as I find that I cannot perfect it in a short enough amount of time.

I need to get real with what I want, that's step one.

Step two, narrow my vision to the goals and priorities I have set until they are achieved.

It all sounds so simple, but putting it into practice is SO hard.  I will keep updating this blog with my progress, my clarified goals, and whatever interest is taking all of my free time at the moment ( see, there I go again ).

I'm often inspired by the 37signals crew. For those that aren't familiar with the company, they are the creators of Ruby on Rails as well as their online service offerings that in my opinion are best-in-class in each of their respective domains ( Backpack, Basecamp, Highrise ).

I posted about the .NET MVC app In/Out before, but unfortunately my blog database took a nosedive and it was one post that I did not write in google docs as is my usual routine, so I have no backup.

The project is posted as open-source (OS) under the MIT license on CodePlex.  Although the releases and source have been downloaded over 100 times and the project has almost 1000 views (I know, in the grand scheme of things this is nothing, but let me bask in my first OS project please), today I received my first bit of feedback on the project.

It was from someone looking to update the project to work with MVC Preview 4, the project is built on Preview 3, and they had an issue they wanted to discuss.

This being my first OS project, it was exhilirating to receive feedback like this on something that I created outside of my workplace that another person found worthy enough to spend their time tinkering with and ultimately maybe using themselves.

I think I might have just caught the OS bug.

More on In/Out .NET, Scubuddy (the project that is absorbing most of my free time ATM), and everything else I am doing doing/thinking of to come.

In general BarCamp (BC) III was slightly less exciting for me than BC II was.  I don't know if it was due to the fact I was now a BC veteran and it was not as fresh of a concept for me as the first experience was, or if my feeling that there were fewer compelling sessions was actually true.

There were definitely fewer sessions for developers this year.  Last year we had the Natuba guys discussing Django and Microsoft made an appearance to show off Silverlight.  On the whole there was only one dissapointing session that I sat through, but I did end up leaving early (~3 p.m.) and last year I was there until they shut the camp down.

There was an interesting FaceBook application discussion and catching the last 45 minutes or so of a discussion on the case for social media for business was also interesting.

I finally had the opportunity to meet Mark Nathan (twitter: @marc1919), but otherwise there were far fewer connections that I made this year.

One major change that I found disappointing (I know others loved it), was the decision to cater lunch from Papa's BBQ.  I remember some great conversations last year as the developers at the Camp went out together and ate lunch, that didn't happen this time.  In the end, one can't complain about free food, but I really enjoyed last year's lunch session.

On the whole, I enjoyed myself immensely and I am looking forward to BarCamp (IV, ?).  Particularly I enjoyed the happy hour the night before at the Caroline Collective.  I met more people in the Houston start-up community in one night than I had in the past year.

Here are seven of my favorite questions/scenarios I use in an interview:

1. What books have you read lately and what books do you recommend to your peers?
2. Describe a technical philosophy you believe has value in the workplace (some examples might be: test-driven development, extreme programming, anything really).  After they answer I tell them that I disagree and that I would like them to convince me otherwise.
3. I describe a scenario that pits their loyalty vs. their ethical sensibilities and ask them to make a choice (I'm looking for the ethical decision).
4. Given a team of 5 people, including yourself, what personalities you would choose for your teammates?
5. If you were suddenly independently wealthy, what would you do with the rest of your life?
6. What are the top three goals you would like to achieve in the next 6 months, year, 5 years?
7. I tell them that I would like them to role-play as my manager and I describe a scenario where I made a trivial mistake and as my manager they must discuss the situation and determine a fair reprimand/outcome.

One of the most, if not the single most, empowering newer technology is the ability to virtualize the server.  Yet it seems that most I.T. organizations still do not understand the power that virtualization can bring to their ability to execute.

A friend of mine recently described me as a "Amazon Web Services (AWS) Evangelist" and I thought it was a fitting description of my recent attempts to prostelize the good news of AWS.  AWS is just one way to harness the power of virtualization, its ability to jump-start the technology needs of a start-up with little to no initial capital expense is its main appeal.  For the entrenched I.T. organization, a solution using VMWare or Microsoft Virtual Server will typical fit the bill. 

The idea is that a virtual server can live and die in your environment with a whim.  Mistakes are corrected in 5-minutes rather than 5-hours if the correct procedures are followed and back up is a breeze.  The radical change that virtualization can bring to your organization is the empowerment of your staff.  Before when a developer had a great idea and required a server to test a hypothesis a real piece of physical hardware was required.  Now, the only requirement is that you have appropriate resources in your virtual cluster.  You can enable your staff to dream big and give them the tools they need to chase their dream without impacting your resources necessary for the business to function.

There are of course areas where the best decision is not to go virtual, one of those being database servers, but for the vast majority of your application server needs a virtualized approach can open a whole new world of possibilities.