*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Saturday evening I arrived back in Hattiesburg after spending a week in Chattanooga, TN and the DevLINK Technical Conference. I had a blast at DevLINK. Here’s a recap of the week’s activities.

Live Radio

Thursday evening John Kellar (DevLINK Chairman), Todd Anglin (Telerik) and myself were on the local radio station 95.3 WPLZ as guests on “You’re Live” which is a weekly technology radio show in Chattanooga hosted by David Karnes. This was a very cool experience as I had never gotten to do live radio before.  The show was an hour long and I have to say it went by in what seemed like literally 10-15 minutes. After the show aired they gave us a recording of it. I took the recording and took out the blanks where the commercials were and uploaded it to this site. You can listen to it here:

http://keithelder.net/Presentations/DevLINK2011/08-18-11-YoureLiveDevLINK.mp3 

Friday’s Keynote

Friday evening I gave the closing keynote speech for DevLINK entitled “What Software Developers can Learn from Forrest Gump". I know… it is a crazy title for a talk to give to a bunch of developers. But you know what? I think I pulled it off, crazy or not.

I thought about posting the slide deck with this post but honestly I don’t think it would do anyone any good without the commentary and stories that go along with it (especially the stories). I can honestly say that just reading through the slides would have zero impact (trust me on this one).

What I will do though is give you a link to the two books I mentioned during the talk.

http://www.amazon.com/Influencing-Integrity-Management-Communication-Negotiation/dp/0933347103

http://www.amazon.com/Got-Sales-Lenann-McGookey-Gardner/dp/0977272052/ 

Thanks to all of the volunteers that made DevLINK awesome and thanks to “Sing it or Wing it” for letting me sing Karaoke Friday night. See you next year!

Funny Tweets from DevLINK

(this one isn’t true but funny, references something I said in the keynote)

Just drop off the key Lee and set yourself free!  Words from a great classic song no doubt (changed up a little to fit the occasion).  What is this about?  The DevLink bus of course!

Amanda Launcher is organizing a bus trip to pickup people all the way from Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky for the DevLink conference. 

There will be community leaders on the bus, .Net User Group leaders, MVPs, Microsoft Evangelist and more.  As she put it on her blog, it is a great time to really dig deep with a lot of the experts. 

More information about the bus.

Of course space is going to be limited so you better get signed up as soon as information comes available.  Oh, and if you haven’t registered for DevLink, remember you only have a few days left until registration goes up to $75.00.  Stop procrastinating and go register.  You may not think it matters to register early but it REALLY helps those of us organizing the event.  It is hard to budget for an event if you don’t know how many are coming.  Thus, go sign up!

At some point in life you have to know your boundaries.  I like to think I know mine pretty well.  Being one of the board members for the DevLink conference this year has reminded me of my strengths and weaknesses.   Yesterday John asked us for some help on making an ad that is going to run in a magazine.  I read the email, and even though I really wanted to help, I knew that I’d better leave that one it alone.  Paint.Net is about as fancy as I get on graphics. 

For fun I did however submit an ad.  Enjoy!

ps – check out the DEVLINK.Net conference

The Elder is officially back from DevLink.  Time to catch up on work, sleep and set the sights on future talks.  Before I put the DevLink memories to bed here is a recap of the conference. 

Thursday

Thursday night as noted here, the speakers ate at Stoney River.  I took pictures of everyone so check out the speaker pictures.  And yes, Wally is in most of them because everyone needs http://www.morewally.com in their life (for those that have been paying attention).   One thing I didn’t post about earlier was I did get into a discussion with Brad Abrams at dinner about Smart Clients, WPF, Silverlight, etc.  It was good to hear where he thinks things are headed with regards to the various technologies.

Friday

Friday morning I had the first session after the key note.  I got there about 30 minutes early and that turned out to be a good thing.  While the room was setup, it wasn’t setup in a conducive manner for giving talks that required programming.  The DevLink folks jumped in and got someone from the University to help out and the problem was solved.  This talk was on “Leveraging Enterprise Library in your Applications”.  Basically the talk was on how to get started with EntLib and how to use the various blocks, the console, etc.  And of course why you would want to use it.  I got a lot of positive comments on the talk and that is good.

After the talk it was back to the speakers room to eat lunch and prepare for the next talk after lunch.  For me the most interesting conversation comes out of the speakers room a lot of times with so much diversity.  When I got there David Laribee, Jeff McWherter, Allan Stevens, Rob Foster, Jon Box, Mark Dunn, Mickey Goussett, Billy Hollis, Rob Howard, David Silverlight and Rob Windsor were all hanging out.  It was quite the room full.  I grabbed a quick sandwich and fired up my demos for the next talk to make sure they worked.

My second talk was on “What’s new for Smart Clients in Visual Studio 2008”.  During the talk Brad Abrams walked in, talking about pressure to perform!  It is amazing how time flies because I had to rush to get done in the end and skip a few demos. 

Later that evening we had a what I thought was a fairly decent little supper at the conference.  Then we had entertainment from a local comedian who was awesome.  After the show was over we sat around and talked it up and then headed to the bar.  A bunch of us rolled out to Jonathan’s Grill and commenced to having drinks.   Good times, good conversation.  Josh Holmes got a head massage at the bar from the waitress which I think was the highlight of the evening.

Saturday

I had to get my oil changed in my truck so I found a local Five-Star Chrysler dealer.  I got back to the conference in time for lunch where I found Mickey, Rob, Jon and Ron Jacobs in the speaker room.   Later Kathleen Dollard, Allan, Jeff and David came in and we got into some pretty good conversation around agile development. 

After the conference a bunch of us went out to Showgun’s and ate some hibachi.   We started out with a reservation for 10 but we had 14 show up.  It was a pretty good crowd to say the least.  Check out the pictures starting here.  After food we headed back to Jonathan’s Grill.  After Jonathan’s several of us rolled downtown to hear some live Nashville music.  I think I was the only person that knew all the songs though.  After that we headed to Waffle House for our forth meal and then back to the hotel.

As you can see it was a great time, the pictures speak for themselves.  Since this is the first conference I’ve ever attended in the South, I have to say that I enjoyed not being the only Southerner.  Many thanks to John Kellar and the volunteers for hosting the conference.  I definitely will be back next year.