It appears that making our way back to California wasn’t in the cards this time around. In two and a half months I’ll be moving from New Haven to Boston. My wife got a rather prestigious job offer in Boston and given that it’s the #2 startup hub in the country it wasn’t too hard to convince me to move. I’m already scoping out a sweet apartment near the “T” (what they call their subway) a few miles from the “Hahbah” (what they call their harbor).
I guess it’s time to transition to another town; to learn the train system, roads, and locations of the grocery store, post office, and good places to eat. After 9 moves in 7 years we’re getting pretty good at it.
I’ll be attending user group meetings and entrepreneur meet-ups to break into the “scene,” so if you’re in the area I hope we can connect.
I don’t typically blog about specific technologies, since the focus of this blog is the human side of software development, and whether you use C# or Python is irrelevant. That said, I use .NET on a day to day basis, and this week’s Microsoft MVP Summit has been quite an experience, so I am wrapping up my experience in this third and final post on the subject.
Day Three
Day three included another round of in-depth sessions presented by the product teams who are building the technology. That’s the coolest part - the Q&A portions were highly technical and people who are actually writing the code behind new ASP.NET features were answering our questions.
Highlights included:
ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) - The Astoria team has done some amazing things, including supporting Atom and JSON out of the box using a REST interface. Activate this feature, slap in some security code, and you have a full REST API to your database. Awesome.
Building Web Apps with Cloud-based Storage - This talk covered SQL Server Data Services from an ASP.NET developer’s perspective. I’m not sure what rock I’ve been living under, but Microsoft will soon be entering beta with their Cloud-based SQL Server storage service, similar to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service.
Looking into the .NET 4.0 Crystal Ball - The ASP.NET product team talked about possible improvements for 4.0 and allowed us to spend 100 Euros between various features (since a dollar isn’t worth much anymore). I can’t talk about specific features due to our NDA, but there are some well thought-out improvements in the works.
Here are the stand-out sessions I attended today (and what I see as the three big technologies Microsoft will be promoting to developers in the coming months):
ASP.NET Dynamic Data - “Why have I never heard of this?” This product is a well-designed, highly configurable scaffolding engine for ASP.NET Web Forms. Essentially, you create a database, generate the Linq to SQL or Entity Framework data model, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data generates your admin screens. The key is the next step: nearly everything is configurable via code (look & feel, behavior, etc…) It’s really well-designed, and something I’ve been trying to find for years with no luck (and believe me, I’ve tried tons of code generation and scaffolding tools over the past 4 years). Scott Hanselman has a good write-up of ASP.NET Dynamic Data here.
Deep Dive into ASP.NET MVC (Phil Haack and Scott Hanselman) - Scott Hanselman is hilarious, and has a knack for explaining complex concepts in plain English. Microsoft is pushing ASP.NET MVC, and while it’s also still young, I think it has the potential to be the dominant non-enterprise ASP.NET development model within 2 years.
Silverlight 2.0 Overview (Scott Guthrie) - Silverlight is an interesting technology that seems like it’s going to have an impact on web development, but not for a year or two. It’s still a very young product, and while useful for displaying media and really cool, interactive demos, it’s still too young for me to get too excited about. I’ll start putting some time in when 3.0 comes around.
I’m in Seattle at the Microsoft MVP Summit. If you’re here and want to grab coffee, drop me an email using the contact link in the right navigation.
Today was a series of open sessions, with topics suggested by the MVPs over the past few months (using a private Wiki, no less, which was pretty cool). Open sessions had minimal structure and were intended to get everyone to participate. The handful I attended went off well, aside from the occasional person who felt he needed to spontaneously demonstrate his mad teaching skills.
I have to admit, I tend to view people with skepticism when they grab the mic in a session and sound just a little too authoritative. I felt a little guilty about this and asked around after one session and found out I wasn’t alone. Whew…guilt assuaged.
Sessions I attended include:
ASP.NET MVC Framework - the code behind feature
So, You Want to Be a Writer?
Data Strategies - ORMs and How They Compare.
Tomorrow we start the formal sessions. I’ve spoken to a few colleagues and have some compliments and gripes to bring to Microsoft - if you have any send them over.
I graduated with an MIS degree while serving in the Military. I took some programming classes like JAVA, C++ etc… I am now back in Boston, MA and find it difficult to find employment where I can learn to become a better programmer. I don’t have the experience but I am willing to learn. Can you please provide me with some direction on what to say on my resume, to gain the experience in the civilian workforce so I can become a better programmer?
“Obviously, there’s no magic bullet. First, Google is investing in brains. Every company has a bell curve, right? It’s different here. The odds are pretty good that if you bump into someone in the cafeteria, they are world-class at something.”
- Google Engineering Director David Glazer in a recent Fast Company article
Lately I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about internet startups and entrepreneurial software developers (or as I like to call them, “developer entrepreneurs”).
And lo and behold, no sooner did I sit down to write about it than I received an email with my “prompt” for this post. It went something like this:
For several years I have been refining a business idea to be conceived as an Internet startup. I have met with numerous developers over time and even after they express support for the business concept, my challenge has been in persuading web developers in partnering in the opportunity as entrepreneurial venture.
Could you suggest to me an approach I could take to persuade Developers, to see such opportunities as business ventures instead of a project/job?
How should I go about selling the business concept enough to have development of the application without initial funds?
If you’re a non-technical founder looking for a developer entrepreneur, these are questions you should ask yourself. Having been on the developer side of the coin a number of times, here is my take.
If you apply for these jobs tell them Rob sent you!
(Palo Alto) Social Gaming at Hive7
The first 3 openings are for a startup social gaming company (they are funded) called Hive7 in Palo Alto. They have over a million users, run on .NET, and are in need of a lead web designer, a lead DBA and a web games developer. Check out the job postings for more details, but their main selling points are:
Massive amounts of creative freedom
Insanely flexible working environment
Great team of mad technologists, elitist designers and prima-donna artists with healthy bent on world domination
(Greater D.C. Area) Counter-terrorism Software at Abraxas Applications
The other opening is for a startup technology company in the Greater D.C. Area called Abraxas Application (3 developers and growing). They are a .NET (C#) / SQL 2005 shop developing a counter-terrorism application. Relocation assistance is possible for the right candidate.
I’ve heard of full disk encryption before - when I worked for a credit card company all of our database servers had full disk encryption and it was very expensive and required a massive deployment effort by our IT staff. But Data Guard Systems’ AlertBoot is a managed service that’s trying to bring this enterprise idea to the masses. At least, those technically savvy masses who care to protect the information they carry on their laptops and PCs.
Targeted at IT departments and marketed at $12.95/month I think this product has a real chance of success - having worked in the financial sector for 3 years this would have been a no-brainer option for securing the laptops we all carted home. We were never supposed to have critical information on our laptops, but I’m sure it happened more often than it should.
Many a moon ago (nearly two years), I had a funny and somewhat sad email exchange with a co-worker named Matt. We had a lot of exchanges along these lines, and in a fashion atypical of this blog I wanted to share this one.
The situation: I made a mistake on a set of Release Notes and he let me know he’d corrected it.
Me: Aaaargh. Sorry about that. Getting sloppy in my old age.
Matt: Don’t sweat it. I’ll send corrections when I come across them. If this was the only thing wrong with any release notes I get, I’d be a happy man.
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