Winter Solstice occurred yesterday at 6:38pm EST, December 21st, 2010. The days will now be getting longer in the Northern Hemisphere, and it is the natural marker for the closing chapters in life and new beginnings. As such, I feel like it is a good time to reflect on what has occurred over the past year and announce what I have in store for the following year.

2010 has been an amazing year! I’ve ridden horseback around the Great Pyramids in the middle of the night, full moon in the sky. I’ve visited the World Expo in Shanghai and watched a Sichuan opera on Jinli Street while eating strange food. I’ve crisscrossed the United States, capturing memories of many wonderful sights along the way. Most importantly, I’ve made many friends around the world. Memories may fade, but those friendships will last a lifetime.

I had many adventures due to my speaking arrangements. The polished version of C# Ninjitsu was finally given at Cairo Code Camp, where I introduced new design principles for a language that is becoming more functional. At the IEEE International Conference for Computer Science and Information Technology, I gave my presentation on Monadic Comprehensions and Functional Composition with Query Expressions. Later in the year, I put together demos of obscure knowledge and toured Secrets of a .NET Ninja through several southern states. Among all these adventures, I ran a user group, wrote articles, and spoke at user groups and code camps throughout the United States.

Looking back at 2010, it’s hard to believe I accomplished all I did while working as a full time software architect. I have my employer, South Carolina Farm Bureau Insurance, to thank for allowing me some flexibility in my work schedule so I could make it on location in time for the events. The company and its leadership have been very good to me.

Therefore, it’s with sadness that I announce I will be leaving South Carolina Farm Bureau Insurance at the end of the calendar year. During my time at the company, I’ve learned a great deal about the insurance industry and made many good friends. I wish everyone success on our projects we’ve worked so hard to create.

Beginning January 3rd, 2011, I will began a new phase in my life.

At PDC 2009, I approached Telerik about sponsorship for my speaking engagements. My choice was based upon Telerik’s quality suite of components and tools for developers and their community involvement. I became one of the first independent speakers that Telerik began sponsoring at community events. Since that time I’ve come to know several members of the Telerik team well, and my respect for Telerik as an organization has only grown. This was the catalyst for my next piece of news.

I am proud to announce that I will be joining Telerik as a developer evangelist! Personally, this feels like a natural fit, and I can’t wait to get started in my official role.

To get an idea for what this means to me, imagine you’re a mechanic working in a shop. You’ve worked on cars your whole life, and you’re really good at what you do and enjoy it. Recently though, you’ve decided to take those skills and build a race car. Each weekend, you take your car to various amateur races. Eventually, you get good enough to get into a few larger races, and then your favorite parts vendor asks you to race for them. Your racing hobby is now your job. There is a lot more to it than the simple days of being a weekend warrior, but it doesn’t even seem like work because racing, and all the its components, are what you do for fun.

If you’re a reader of this blog, you may be wondering if my blog and activities will be affected by Telerik. It means I will deliver more content, screencasts, and speaking engagements! Yes, I will blog about Telerik products from time to time as I blog about what I’m working on, but I will deliver straight-edge coding content on a more regular basis as well. It’s basically a win for anyone who subscribes to this blog.

In 2011, I am making a career change from software development/architecture to developer evangelism. This is an exciting phase in my life, and I thank you all for being part of it. Be sure to say hi at the next event.

Happy holidays!

I had a great time at Philly Code Camp! Unfortunately, I forgot to pack my camera, so I had to use my phone camera instead. Here’s the gallery on Facebook.

My topic was Introduction to MSBuild, and Telerik sponsored my involvement in that Code Camp. I usually only do the Telerik sponsored events in conjunction with my C# Ninjitsu session (the .NET Ninja shirts match), but everyone was appreciative and applauded Telerik when I told how it’s through their help that I’m able to make it out so far.

I won the speaker prize during the end of the day raffle, and everyone tried take it from me. If you win a piece of paper worth a several grand, no one will mess with you, but when it comes to hardware they’re like snakes. Here’s my prize, in case you’re interested:

I hitched a ride in Miguel Castro’s Mustang GT convertible to the after party. How cool would it be to take that around the Pyramids at Giza at midnight?! From there, it was what you expect from a bunch of computer nerds… in a bar. We drank beer, ate bar food, and talked shop. I get some of my best info hanging out with other speakers at the after events. Information in a presentation is oftentimes newer than information from books. Information you get during social events is newer than the presentation, because it has not been distilled and formalized. If you go home immediately after a conference, you’re missing out.

Thanks to my friend Steve Andrews, I made it to the airport on time Sunday morning. You rock, Steve!

I sometimes hang out with Kevin at Code Camps in the Virginia area, and we’ve had some interesting discussions on .NET 4.0. Thanks to the wonders of video, you can get his perspective on Windows 7, Silverlight, and being an MVP… all without traveling to Virginia!

The Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild meeting went well. I discovered that the demonstrations run too long for a Code Camp, so I will need to shorten it for next weekend's SoCal Code Camp. Justin James offered a great tip: put all the code into a prewritten application. This will definitely speed things up, but I think there are a couple of mollifiable drawbacks.

The first draw back is that some of the samples can't compile. This is either because I am demonstrating what can't be done (assign a List<string> to a List<object>). I can either put them in a project that I don't expect to compile and not compile the solution, or I can place them in code snippets.

The second draw back is I feel that it's easy to lose the audience when the code is already there. The temptation is to run through it with the expectation that the audience will understand it; after all, they're coders too. Of course, coders are human (sometimes). One way to handle that is to slow the pace down to a speed that's quicker than typing the code but still gets the point clearly across. Another way to handle it is to create a project for each little piece so that they're in digestible chunks. One reason prebuilt code is hard to understand at demonstration time is due to the irrelevant code surrounding where the focus should be.

The person in Florence who suggested I explain the difference between var and dynamic had a good point. I never considered understanding that an issue, but it makes sense if someone isn't familiar with C# 3.0. They assume var means variant, which is far from the truth.

I gave my new presentation, "The Future of Managed Code," tonight at the Pee Dee Area .NET User Group in Florence, SC. There was a pretty decent turn out for the presentation, and it turned out everyone was a C# developer. This meant I was able to gloss over the new features in VB10 and talk more about new features in C# 4.0. Even glossing over the VB10 material, the presentation went over an hour, so I think I will need to streamline some of it to fit the Code Camp schedules.

One problem I had was the speed of the VPC. I will have to figure out how to improve performance with it. I will add some more RAM so I can devote resources to it. Page suggested running the image off of a USB hard drive to prevent thrashing. I'll give both of those a shot to see what I can squeeze out of it.

One attendee recommended that I spend more time explaining what a dynamic is. Although I try to avoid slides, I think I will need to add some because a good visual can make all the difference here. In particular, the attendee was concerned that others may be confused by the difference between the var and dynamic keywords. It never occurred to me that this could be a problem.

I also need to fix the COM portion of the presentation. My excel application never popped up. I'll fix up the code and slap it into a snippet.

I'll be doing the same presentation tomorrow in Columbia, SC. Come out if you can make it!

I opened my email this morning to discover that I received two awards. First of all, I was awarded 7th place in the Community Credit December 2008 contest. I wasn't able to log into Community Credit for months because my user name didn't appear to be working. However, last night I was determined to submit my points for the INETA Community Champion Program before the year ended, and that program links to the Community Credit program. I eventually figured out how to get my user name, then submitted everything I could remember from the past year. My prize? The Plug Mug!

More importantly, I was awarded MVP Visual C#! I am very honored to be recognized by the MVP program for my contributions to the development community over the past year. I hope to live up to the title and deliver even more for the community in 2009!

If you're not an MVP and haven't received "stupid prizes to smart people"; here's how you do it. Get involved. If you're reading this, you're likely already a software developer of some caliber. Join your local user group. If one doesn't exist, start one. Give presentations on something that interests you. Answer questions in forums. Blog about technology. Once you do this, you may even discover that the official awards given by organizations aren't the true awards. The true awards for being involved are the people you meet, the connections you make, and the personal growth you experience.

It's the end of the 2008, and I will be celebrating the new year with Kitty and some friends from work tonight. Although this is a time for fun, I feel it's important to look back and analyze what I've done and identify areas of improvement.

Here is what I have accomplished this year:

1) Ran Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild
2) Presented at 13 events.

It may not look like much, but doing all of that takes a good amount of energy. Running a user group is a constant process with many surprises that crop up each month. You have to email members about meetings, arrange speakers, arrange sponsors, and facilitate the meetings to ensure things run smoothly. Presenting requires a lot of preparation and travel to places like Miami or Boston on your own dime.

However, I feel like I could have done more. I didn't blog as much as I would have liked. I was off and on in the forums. I didn't write many book reviews. I didn't present in as many places as I could have. I didn't maintain my Community Credit account (costing me stupid prizes).

Although I don't make resolutions, I do want to look back at 2009 and be more amazed at my accomplishments than I am looking back at 2008. So, that is my personal goal this year: contribute more to the community than I did the year before. I want to blog more, present more, and answer more questions. Most importantly, I want to grow the developer community in Columbia, SC.

I'm leaving for Atlanta tonight to attend MDC tomorrow. I will also attend the Influencer Reception after the conference. My goal is to soak up as much information about Azure Services and Live Mesh that I can and attend C# 4.0 presentations to get pointers for my own presentation that I will be giving at user groups.

Here's my planned schedule:

10:15-11:30 The Future of Managed Languages: C# and Visual Basic
12:30-1:45 Developing and Deploying Your First Azure Service
2:00-3:15 A Lap Around the Live Framework and Mesh Services 
3:30-4:45 ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap 
6:00-??? Influencer Reception
 

I will be presenting at New England Code Camp 10: Dev InTENsity! this weekend. Chris Bowen has posted the schedule on his blog.

Here are my presentations:

Sunday, September 21st 9:00am, Room MPR B (moved to MPR A), New Features in C# 3.0
Sunday, September 21st 12:30PM, Room MPR B, Introducing MSBuild

I've been busy since the South Florida Code Camp. I've been promoted to the Architecture Team on the South Carolina Integrated Tax System project, and I've been to two more code camps.

The speaker list was already full when I tried to get in on the Raleigh Code Camp. I was still able to do a session on Continuous Integration due to another speaker's VM crashing. I had very few attendees since it wasn't advertised. However, as long as I have one person interested in the topic then I'm good to go.

Last weekend I did two sessions at the Roanoke Code Camp. The Design Principles presentation went very well, with enough crowd participation to keep it interesting. The Continuous Integration session went smoothly, but the crowd was somewhat quiet. Afterwards, one of the attendees told me that he thought it was a follow-up to the Design Principles session (apparently confusing MSBuild with Building Software). So, it's possible the crowd was quiet because they had no background in what I was presenting on. This was exacerbated by the fact I was in the same room.

From now on, if I'm going to do multiple sessions I will try to do related topics (design or agile processes) or request to be in different rooms.

This coming Wednesday I will be presenting on Continuous Integration at the Triangle .Net User Group in Raleigh. I've currently been running two 30 minute modules: 1) MSBuild, 2) CI / Cruise Control.NET. I will put together a new module this weekend so I can fill out the time more appropriately for a user group meeting. I'll probably take it back to fleshing out the build process with running more tests and integrating the generated reports into CruiseControl.NET.

After next week, I will have done 8 sessions at 6 events in 5 locations. It's still early in the year so perhaps I should set my goal to 20 locations instead of 20 events? When do you want me to come to Charleston, Lou?