*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I think it is unanimous that everyone really enjoyed Lansing Day of .Net.  I know I did.

I arrived Friday evening close to 6:00 PM outside of Lansing, MI in Okemos and met up with the LDoDN organizers at Kinkos.  Jeff put me to work and I wound up preparing all the speaker name badges.  After I finished my task I thought I would personally let each speaker know that I had carefully and ever so tenderly taken care of their speaker badges.  Thus I signed the back of each and every one saying:

I folded your card. – The Elder

Once we finished at Kinkos all of us headed to the Festival of the Moon in old downtown Lansing for the speaker get together.  After an hour or so we headed down the street to a pizza place to sing karaoke where we were joined with some local developers.  Jeff, Alan, Dan and myself put our names in the pot to sing. 

I didn’t think I was going to get to sing but they called my name last.  I sang a rousing rendition of a Billy Vera and the Beaters classic called “At this moment”.  The pizza placed closed at 11:00 PM and it was a long day of travel and time to get some sleep.  We headed back to Jeff and Carla’s home where they had graciously offered up their home for out of town speakers to stay (thanks again guys!). 

The next morning I got up and stuck around the house to work on my slide deck.  I had started going down the path of reworking the slides and had to finish my “theme” I had started. 

I arrived at the conference about 9:30 AM on Saturday and met up with old friends and people I hadn’t seen in awhile.  I gave my talk on Structure and Guidance for Organizing Solutions in Visual Studio at 11:00 and the room was packed.  There were 70 chairs in the room and there were people standing up in the back of the room.  I had a lot of people come up to me afterwards and later that night at the get together that said it was a really good talk.  I think reworking my slide decked helped that a lot.

After the LDoDN event ended instead of all the speakers and organizers going out to eat, Jeff and Carla decided to have the get together at their house.  Like Jeff said, it was cheaper to just buy food and have everyone over to the house than trying to go out and eat somewhere.  Not only that but a lot of the attendees came over as well which is what made it worth it for me. 

Once it got dark a bond fire was started and we sat around the fire playing guitar and singing.  This is me playing blues on Corey’s harmonica with Alan.  A bit later Rock Band was broke out and we played until about midnight.  I hadn’t played Rock Band in probably 3 months so my drumming was incredibly rusty.  I need to get back into practice mode.

The bar was definitely raised for Day of .Nets with LDoDN and I was happy I got to participate.  I can’t believe how much “community” has been built in the Midwest region just over the past year.  I think it all started with Codemash a few years ago and it has just been a snow ball rolling down hill since.  I also think Twitter has played a large roll in keeping the community together as well but that is a post for another day.

Great job to the organizers and a big thanks to Jeff and Carla for opening up their home to us.

I’m packing right now to head to Detroit for the weekend as well as the better part of next week.  Tomorrow I will be traveling to Michigan.  I’ll be landing in Detroit and then headed to Lansing, MI to meet up with the hosts of Lansing Day of .Net and other speakers.  Saturday I’ll be speaking on “Structure and Guidance for Organizing Visual Studio Solutions”. I’m pretty excited about this topic because it is one of those classic talks that never gets old.  I’ve had upwards of 10 people email me already saying they wanted to know more about that talk because they were not going to be able to attend the event.  I have the slides on my presentations section but they are WAY out of date.  I’ll be updating the slide deck once it settles down. I’m constantly tweaking things and right now the slide deck is a serious moving target.  I also need to create a video that shows how this is done.  The slides are OK but until you watch it in person and learn all the tricks you may not get it.

Woody and I are planning on trying to record a podcast or two on Saturday if time and a great topic appears magically out of thin air.  No guarantees what we record will make the air but we at least want to try to record something since we’ll both be there sporting our DFB t-shirts.  

Sunday I’ll be back in Livonia.  I’ll be in Livonia through Wednesday.  Thus if you are in the are and want to hang out, just let me know.  Text msg, twitter, smoke signal or whatever.  Now to finish packing (the worst part about traveling).

Episode 4 of Deep Fried Bytes is out!  In this episode we sat down with Joe Stump, the Lead Architect for DIGG.Com and discussed all kinds of things.  Joe gave us a behind the curtain look at how DIGG scales, which technologies they use and some interesting insight into language wars. 

We promised to give a shirt away on this episode but the show was long enough as it is, thus we’ll probably announce the winner later in the week or on the next show.

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Michael Eaton threw the gauntlet at me last week wondering why I hadn’t blogged about how I got into software development.  Here are the series of questions he proposed and the answers.

How old were you when you started programming?

I attempted to program a Timex Sinclair 1000 that I got for Christmas one year.  I can’t even remember how old I was, maybe 9 I guess.  I spent countless hours trying to figure that thing out but it just didn’t sink in.  In 8th grade our Math teacher started teaching some of us Basic.

How did you get started in programming?

In college I was a hardware junkie.  I enjoyed building computers, tearing them apart, upgrading, etc.  The infatuation of building and upgrading computers at first was a hobby.  As time passed I started upgrading friends computers, family, etc.  One day I was in the tech department at the college trying to get something fixed with my school account.  There was a guy named Greg who ran the IT department for the school standing in the office.  I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me but he mentioned something about upgrading a professor’s computer to someone else in the office.  I over heard and jumped in.  I told him he should look at a different part, I had had trouble with the one he was going to use.  We started talking and that was the moment in my life that opened the flood gates into the Information Technology world.  It turns out Greg was hiring and needed help.  Any chance to work and learn I was in.  He interviewed me (which was basically us sitting around talking about IRQs, Ports, modems, video cards, drivers, etc) and I got the job.  The job at the tech department for the college was split.  Helpdesk in the morning, and then hardware upgrades in the evening.  It was the time on the Help Desk where I got introduced into programming.  A lot of the guys on the team had spent a lot of time writing scripts to automate things.  The scripts were shell scripts to repair people’s accounts, etc.  It was the exposure of telling a computer what to do to make life easier that got me hooked. 

Sometime during my junior year of college my infatuation with computers had evolved into a full blown obsession.  I was a music major in college, a trombonist actually.  One day my trombone professor told me I should seriously consider getting a degree in computer science.  Everyone around me knew about my obsession with computers, including my professors.  I weighed my options and considered starting a degree in CompSci but there were too many road blocks from student loans, scheduling (certain classes are only offered at certain times and you need them to graduate), etc.  Thus I decided to opt for a minor and take summer classes.  By the way I never got to finish my minor due to student loan constraints.  But, I had learned enough to know that I was A) good at it B) loved the ever living heck out of it and C) knew I wasn’t going to stay in music very long after I graduated.

I was forced to graduate in the fall of ’96 since I had finished my music degree.  I say forced because student loans wouldn’t lend me any more money due to the number of hours I had accumulated.  So I got a job as a band director.  When I got my first real paycheck as a band director I went to the book store and grabbed up a bunch of books and started combing through them at night after work and on the weekends.  Six months later I got married and the wife and we moved to Ann Arbor, MI to get her educated at the University of Michigan.  Since my teacher’s salary was going to pay me through the summer, I had plenty of time to try to find a job in IT (which is really what I wanted).  That summer I found a job running the IT department of a small start up in Ann Arbor which landed me in a perfect place to spread my wings.

What was your first language?

My very first language was Basic.  It was taught to us in school by our Math teacher who was really into computers back then.  The school didn’t have an official computer curriculum, it was just something we did on the side. 

What was the first real program you wrote?

A really bad Perl shopping cart.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Basic, Bash, Perl, Pascal, Python, PHP, JavaScript, C, C#  (Note:  I’ve played with countless others, but these are the ones I have written production code for over the years)

What was your first professional programming gig?

I was working for a hardware reseller who wanted to build an online store and presence.  The company is still in business today and the web site is still powered by all the back end processing that was written nearly 10 years ago.  The store cart has since been re-written but still has the a lot of the same characteristics that were originally done.  Check it out:  http://www.affordablecomputers.com/ 

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Absolutely, and I would have created Yahoo!, Google, and countless other companies. 🙂

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Being a programmer is a life long learning experiment.  It is not something you go to school for, get out, get a job, and you are prepared for life.  I equate being a programmer to the same type of profession as a lawyer or a doctor.  The law is constantly changing and you certainly don’t want to hire a lawyer that isn’t up on the law.  Nor do you want a doctor operating on you with 30 year old technology.  Whoever succeeds in these professions has to understand they will be learning how to do their job for the rest of their life.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?

Programming without deadlines or requirements.  I don’t classify working on a bug someone submits at work as fun.  Fun for me is sitting down and building something from scratch where I become the programmer, project manager, business analyst and architect.  The only limitation I have then is myself.

Yesterday we released the third episode of our Deep Fried Bytes podcast show.  The third episode is about the online social networking phenomenon Twitter.  A group of Twitter power users met up on the last day of the TechEd 2008 Conference to discuss their ideas, experiences and observations of the online service. 

You can read more about the show, show notes, and about our guests by visiting:

 http://deepfriedbytes.com/podcast/episode-3-twitter-war-stories/.

Ways To Listen To The Show

There are several ways to listen to Deep Fried Bytes.

1.  Directly From The Web Site

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Since the second episode we’ve made a lot of progress.  The biggest news is anyone that wants to listen to the show can do so simply by opening the iTunes Store or the Zune Market Place (for those that have iPods and Zunes).  Once you open iTunes or Zune simply search for “Deep Fried Bytes” and you’ll be able to subscribe to us.  Subscribing via iTunes or Zune allows you to keep up with the current shows on your portable devices.  Click either of the two icons below to automatically subscribe to the show if you have iTunes or Zune installed. 

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Welcome Elly Mae To The Show!

We’d like to welcome Elly Mae to the third episode.  We decided we needed a token Southern Belle on the show so we asked Elly Mae and she said yes!  For those that haven’t listened to the show yet, Elly Mae is helping us out with introducing the show.  She did a fantastic job her first time out and is already mounting legions of fans. 

For those that have written in already asking who Elly Mae is, we can’t say, she wishes to remain anonymous at this time.  She did want me to say she hoped you enjoyed her doing the intros and she can’t wait to do the next show.