Mijn Tirades en Tieren

I know that the title of this post may be a bit of link bait, sorry about that. But having been in this business quite a while now, I am noticing a trend. A trend that worries me.

It’s that time again. I’ve recently released a new course on Pluralsight. This time I tackle Web Development for complete beginners.

As many of you know, me and my new wife are having the trip of our life. We’re in Switzerland at the moment and having a great time. We are certainly learning as we go what is important and what is not. I thought it might be a fun chance to talk about the gear I’ve used so far and discuss what worked and what didn’t.

Even though I can’t be there this year, I’m excited to help out in holding this year’s Atlanta Code Camp. On October 11th, 2014, the Atlanta Code Camp will be held at the Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia.

For my last stop of my UK user group tour, I stopped in the town of Aberdeen. This is as far north as I’ve ever been. It’s at 57 degrees north latitude. That’s the same as Juneau Alaska! Luckily it’s summer time.

It’s been a busy week. Today I got to spend the day in Glasgow and see the city a bit. In the evening I got to talk to a great group of developers about Angular.js. They were mostly open to the ideas about building interactive pages with Angular.js.

I’m now on the Scotland swing of my Wilder World Tour.  Had a chance to stop by Edinburgh. What a lovely city, at least as much as I’ve seen so far.

The first blog post I ever wrote was a short one on databases. In fact for those of you who haven’t been following me for more than ten years, my old domain was “ADOGuy.com”. I wrote about ADO and ADO.NET pretty exclusively for years.

My next stop this week was in the town of Gloucester in England. The group that ran this meetup was great and had everything setup to make this an easy talk to give. I especially want to thank Franck Terray and Sophie Lipowska for running the meetup.

The last stop of the week was in Nottingham. I had a chat with the Sheriff about some stolen hoodies. At least that’s what I thought he said – his accent was quite thick ; )

I stopped by the small town of Hereford to talk to them about Node.js on Monday. The small, but very enthusiastic group was great! If you get a chance stop by and visit this adorable small town.

As my first talk in the UK, I was tasked with doing two talks in one day.  The group was a lot of fun and asked some key questions.

Next week I start a short swing around southern and south-midlands England. I had hoped to do more events in England, but this short swing of four user groups is all I’m doing in England (though I’ll be in close-by Scotland in early August and Ireland in September).

Quick reminder that I’m going to be holding a quick, informal Nerd Dinner in London, UK this Thursday (July 17th, 2014) at 6:30pm (or 18:30 if you prefer) local time!

I do enjoy building things with code. When I started 28 years ago, that’s what I thought was the essence of what a “computer person’s” (e.g. software developer) job was to sit dark in a room and grind out computer code. Of course we know that it just isn’t true.

JavaScript is having a great year. With the continuation of web development, Node.js, and even Apple adding JavaScript as a replacement for their AppleScript.

I love what I do. The consulting, the software development, the courses…I really love it all. It keeps me in a constant state of learning and I am overjoyed and extremely lucky for this to be my life’s passion.

John Robbins has saved me in uncountable ways over the years due to is great work on books and tool for debugging. That’s why I was so excited when he agreed to be on the show.

Jon Flanders and I go back to our DevelopMentor days and now we’re both authors at Pluralsight. It was great catching up and see how he got started.

I’m happy to announce that I will be working with the Humanitarian Toolbox to both help publicize this important project as well as work on some of the projects. This is an important open source project that is trying to do some real good for the world out there.

I am getting married and that means I get a bunch of development tasks to do for the wedding planning. I guess it’s my own fault, I did propose with an app.

I am a developer first. I’ve become my family’s IT department but not by choice. This is the fate of most developers I know.

As a fan of the direction of ASP.NET, I’ve been an avid fan of Phil Haack’s for some time now. His clarity of communicating why the web should work definitely helped ASP.NET become the great framework it is today. He’s now doing the same thing at GitHub!

I recently had the pleasure of talking to the “A Bunch of Devs” user group in Atlanta about Web API. I had never spoken at this group and I had a great time.