Entries Tagged 'About this Blog' ↓

After more than two years using Community Server 1.0 I finally threw in the towel and moved to WordPress. If you’re reading this you made it to the new site (or RSS feed).

Community Server 1.0
In June of 2005 I decided to start blogging. I surveyed the blog engine landscape and although a friend of mine who was more familiar with blogs told me to use WordPress, I opted for Community Server (CS), since I’m a .NET developer and CS is written in .NET.

The initial configuration should have been a warning to head for the open source hills. After the installation I had two semi-custom items on my agenda:

1. Make my blog the home page (since by default CS has a landing page where you can visit forums, galleries, and other pages)
2. Run the RSS feed through FeedBurner so I could track subscribers.

Together, these tasks must have taken north of 8 hours. It was insane.

Continue reading →

TechieCrossing, a technology job site, just published a nice write-up on me as part of their Tech Star series (complete with a color photograph). An excerpt:

“At the University of California, Davis, Rob immersed himself in a formidable double major in computer engineering and electrical engineering. He had decided early on that he did not want to pursue programming; in fact, after his C++ (mid-level programming) class, he swore he would never write code again.”

You can read it here.

From Microsoft’s website: “Worldwide, there are over 100 million participants in technical communities; of these participants, there are fewer than 4,000 active Microsoft MVPs.”

About two weeks ago I joined the ranks of Microsoft MVPs in ASP.NET. My best estimate is that there are around 350 ASP.NET MVPs worldwide, and I feel truly honored to be among them.

The award was based on my blog, technical articles, open source and forum contributions, and user group involvement.

Perks include private forums, a certificate that’s nicer than my college diploma, a 1GB leather-bound thumb drive, a 1-year MSDN or TechNet subscription, and the MVP Summit, where Microsoft pays for all the MVPs to stay in lavish hotels in Redmond while they meet with their corresponding product teams.

Looks like it’s going to be a good year.

As most of you know, I run a .NET consulting firm called The Numa Group. As of this week we are now a three-person operation, as we welcome Patty Torrey to the team.

I met Patty and her husband, who now live in the Bay Area, at UC Davis during our trek through the Computer Engineering program. She thinks we stayed in touch because of all the good times we had at Davis, but my hidden agenda was that one day I hoped to have her phenomenally talented programming mind at my disposal. If you’ve been sitting on some .NET / ASP.NET development work, now’s the time to drop me a line, because Patty will be booked in no time.

Welcome aboard, Patty!

I apologize for the intermittent outages Software by Rob has experienced over the past few days. My web host lost a server and spent the better part of last night re-building it. Hopefully it’s all behind us.

Web hosting is an interesting business; a host might collect $15 per hosting account per month. A small host might have around 500 live accounts, which would carry a tremendous support load, with gross revenue around $7500 per month, or $90k per year. But the expense of hardware, connectivity, rackspace, and software licenses would chew deep into those profits, leaving little for compensation.

Add to that the constant tech support, angry customers, and the requirement for 24/7 uptime, and it’s one business I would never recommend.

If you live in L.A., have at least 2 years of ASP.NET experience and are looking to work on some really cool, cutting-edge .NET projects, send your resume to rob@softwarebyrob.com.

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time you’ll know that I’m going to ask a lot of technical questions during the interview, and that I’ll only hire top notch developers. But on the flip side, I’m easy to work with, nearly all of the work is what we as developers consider “interesting” or “challenging,” and most of it will be done from home (with rare on-site meetings). The bulk of the work is for internet startups building public facing .NET web applications using .NET 2.0 and AJAX.

And since I want you to have top-notch equipment to complement your top-notch development skills, after our first project is complete I’ll buy you two brand new 22″ widescreen flat panel monitors (yours to keep).

Check your calendar. It’s not April 1st.

My wife, who is entering the sixth year of her PhD in Psychology, applied to several schools around the country for her final year of training, and was accepted to the only school in New Haven, CT that any of us have heard of: Yale. So we’re packing our stuff and moving East for 1-2 years.

East, where the winters are cold and the trees change color in the fall.

Yes, “that programming blogger from Los Angeles” is going to become “that programming blogger from Los Angeles who’s living in Connecticut for a couple years and then probably moving back to California, but most likely to the Bay Area.” I wonder if I can fit that on my business cards?

I’m in the process of reserving a couple of moving containers so we don’t have to drive a U-Haul across country (how many horror stories can you hear before you just won’t try it yourself?). I’ve contacted a company that can ship our cars. I’m finding renters for our house, and I’ve already scoped out the two 22″ widescreen Dell monitors I’ll be purchasing once we find our new, much larger living space (since New Haven is cheaper than L.A.).

As I mentioned in a previous post, I re-entered the world of consulting about 7 months ago when I once again opened the doors of my .NET consulting firm, The Numa Group. Since the majority of my workload is off-site development I’m in a great position to move across the country; all I need is a phone and a laptop…and two 22″ widescreen monitors.

Based on my initial research the tech community looks a little thin, but I have to imagine with all the brain-power at Yale that there are some really cool technology groups in the area. Also, if I want a big city tech fix it’s tough to beat a 90-minute train ride to New York City and a 2-hour ride to Boston.

I’m off to sell my surfboards and buy some coats. Big coats.

For those who are interested, here are the results of the four poll questions I’ve posted over the past for months (with commentary and my response to each):

Are you a...

• Software Developer - 49%
• Technical/Team Lead - 31%
• Manager - 11%
• Other - 9%

Commentary: 80% of my readers are developers or tech leads?! Gasp! Choke!

I’m kidding - no surprises here. I am curious what the “other” category consists of - I can only assume DBAs, network and sys admins, helpdesk, and QA folk.

For those who are curious, I marked myself as a Software Developer.

What is your main programming language?

• A .NET language - 36%
• Java - 22%
• C/C++ - 14%
• Other - 12%
• PHP - 7%
• Ruby - 5%
• Perl - 3%

Commentary: I purposefully left this question ambiguous so people could choose their favorite language or the language they use the most.

72% of readers use enterprise languages such as .NET, Java, and C/C++, 15% use scripting languages, and 12% fall into “other.” I realized after I posted that I left out VB5/6…sorry about that.

For myself, I selected “A .NET laguage.”

How old are you?

• 20-29 - 51%
• 30-39 - 38%
• 40-49 - 8%
• 50-59 - 2%
• Under 20 or over 60 - 1%

Commentary: I probably shouldn’t be, but I was shocked that 89% of my readers are 20-39 years old. I guess software development coupled with reading a blog really narrows the field to that age group. Way to break the mold 40, 50 and 60 year olds!

I marked 30-39.

What is your highest level of education?

• Bachelor’s Degree - 54%
• Master’s Degree - 24%
• Up to a high school diploma - 20%
• PhD or higher - 2%

Commentary: A pretty even distribution with Bachelor’s earners (myself included) at slightly more than half the readership.

Please click here to answer the question for today: What is your highest level of education?

I’m receiving fairly regular requests to post job listings on SbR so I’ve decided to follow in the footsteps of a few other blogs and launch a small job board (if you’re reading this on the web, you may have already noticed it staring at you from the upper-right corner of each page). I’m using a third party called JobThread to handle the heavy lifting, which makes it easy to see if a Software by Rob job board will fly. In 10 minutes I was up and running.

To celebrate the launch I’m having a special for the first month: $30 buys you a 30-day listing, which places your job in front of 25,000-35,000 software developers.