When we first started talking about having an event in Kalamazoo in October of 2008, we wanted to do something different.  This region has plenty of Day of .NET events, so our idea of “different” was to focus on soft skills and stay clear of hardcore technical topics.  In the past month or so, we have lined up an extraordinary group of speakers who are bringing over a dozen amazing sessions to the Kalamazoo X Conference (register here).

As the person responsible for putting together the schedule, I immediately realized how difficult that particular job is.  All these great speakers (almost all of them good friends) and all the great topics made the task almost impossible.  I did my best to put together a 4-track event with each session coming in at about 70 minutes.  As I began updating the website with the session information, something didn’t feel right.

A couple weeks ago, the planning team (me, John, Mark and Michael) had lunch in Kalamazoo (Fat Tony’s Grille & Sports Bar is really good BTW) and started talking about the schedule.  Everyone at the table voiced the same opinion: multi-track conferences suck because you always end up having to make decisions and end up missing out on sessions you want to see.  We began discussing how we could alleviate this problem.  The most obvious idea was to change the format of the event. 

One of my concerns with this idea is that almost all of the speakers are good friends, many from Ohio, and I hated the idea of screwing with the format with only 3-4 weeks until the event.  I mean, if we changed it too much, maybe some of them wouldn’t want to make the 4+ hour drive to Kalamazoo.  In the end though, we had two choices: do nothing and force attendees (including ourselves) to choose between some amazing sessions OR we could make a drastic change and hope the speakers would go for it.  

After a lot of deliberation, the X Conference planning team  has decided to make a major change to the format of the event:  We are now a single-track conference! 

Instead of 4 tracks with 5 sessions each, we have asked all the speakers to adjust their talks to fit within a 20-30 minute session.  This means everyone will get to see all of the sessions and all the speakers will be able to present in front of the entire crowd.  While I’m still waiting to hear back from all the speakers, the ones that have responded have done so in a very positive way.  One of the speakers responded with this:

“On a personal note, Mike, I’m really looking forward to this event now that you’ve changed the format. It’s different, fast, exciting, I’m VERY interested to see how this format shapes the conversations of the day. I simply can’t wait to be there.”

I’m really excited about this change too and hope, if you’re within a few hours of Kalamazoo, that you’ll be there!  I will be posting updated speaker / session information to the website over the next couple of days.  

Register here

On April 25th, the Microsoft Developer’s of Southwest Michigan (MDSM) will be hosting The Kalamazoo X Conference.  While a relatively new member to the group, I have been working very closely with Mark Gilbert, John Burns and Michael Merkel (and a few others) to make this a kick-ass event.

The Kalamazoo X Conference is a one-day software development conference hosted in beautiful Southwest Michigan. While there are many great technical conferences in the region, their focus tends toward new technologies and programming languages. The Kalamazoo X Conference intends to uniquely complement those conferences by enabling attendees to boost their process, design, and communication skills in the following areas:

• Human interaction, including social, personal, and career development.
• Interface and graphic design
• Development processes and best practices
• Requirements analysis, architecture, design, and modeling

This one day, one of a kind conference is being held April 25, 2009 from 8AM to 6PM in beautiful downtown Kalamazoo.

Check out our website, register and follow us on twitter!

On January 22nd, I attended the MDC in Detroit.  Since I didn’t feel like braving the Detroit-area traffic Thursday morning, and since I made plans to room with Alan, I drove up the night before.  After picking Alan up at the airport at 6, we headed for the RenCen.

While Alan was off doing “speaker” things, I caught up with Corey and then recorded almost an hour of video for his “How did you get started in programming” video series.   I love how my simple blog post inspired Corey to take it one step further.  I definitely expanded on my story in that 45+ minute interview.  I had a great time doing it, so hopefully I don’t bore everyone to tears.

After the interview with Corey, we caught back up with a bunch of the speakers and talked for a while about a wide range of subjects.  By the time we were done talking, it was almost midnight, so Alan and I headed up to our room and crashed. 

Before I knew it, it was 6am and my alarm was going off.  Since Alan had some pre-event stuff to do, he was up, showered and dressed pretty damn quick.  I on the other hand, managed to snag another 30 minutes of sleep.

Thankfully, I left my laptop in the room because with no wi-fi at the event, there was no point in hauling it around.  I registered pretty quickly, then caught up with Josh and some other friends.  I originally planned on skipping the keynote because, well, because most keynotes suck.   I’m not sure why, but I decided to stick this one out.  I think 90 minutes is a long time for a keynote, but Ron Jacobs did a good job of giving us the 50k foot view of all the technologies the day would cover.

I ended up hanging out a lot of the day, catching up with friends that came in from Ohio and western Michigan.  The sessions I did try to catch were packed.  I’m not sure what was up with the tiny-ass break-out rooms, but there was standing room only in the sessions I checked out.  Alan was leading the Community Courtyard, so I sat in a few great conversations, almost exclusively focused on the technologies being presented in the breakout sessions.

After the event, a bunch of us went out for pizza (thanks Microsoft for picking up the tab!), hung out and talked (well, tried to talk since it was pretty freakin’ loud).  After pizza, a few brave souls headed to a casino, while the rest of us walked back to the hotel.  My plan was leave around 9 so I’d be home before midnight.  Yea, right.  I ended up getting caught up in a great conversation with Brian, Bender and Chris and didn’t leave until around 10:15. 

While Chris and I drove separately, we were heading in the same direction so we decided to stick close on the drive back.  Of course, it took about 30 minutes for Chris to find his car in the parking garage and then we made a wrong turn based on bad directions given to us by a parking attendant.  We finally got on the road around 11pm.  We decided to take US-12 since it was the most direct route home.  The heavy fog we ran into during the first part of our trip was unexpected, but overall, the trip back wasn’t bad.

When all was said and done, I came away from this event pretty fired up about Windows 7 and MEF.  I actually tried installing Windows 7 on my laptop, but due to some driver-related issues, I bailed and reinstalled Vista.  The features I was really anxious to use were mounting VHDs as drives, booting to VHDs and the decreased resource usage / increased performance.  Hopefully when Windows 7 is fully-baked, I won’t have as many issues.

As for MEF, I’m not sure I’m as fired up today as I was leaving the event.  Again, it comes down to it being an “in-progress, almost-there, kinda sorta” offering that I’m not comfortable using in a production application.  Maybe I’ll re-visit it when .NET 4.0 comes out, but for now, as with Windows 7, I’ll survive without it.

On January 5th, Jeff called me out in his “Goals for 2009” post.

My goals for 2009 are pretty simple:

1. Keep the work coming in.

The first six months of 2008 were tough.  While waiting for some contracts to come through last year, I had a really tough time finding work to fill the gaps.  The last six months of 2008 were amazing and I hope to continue that success through all of 2009 and into 2010 (and further).   This means focusing on the business side of things and making sure I’m keeping the pipeline full *without* burning myself out.

2. Write more.

Jeff talked about posting 100 times to his blog and I think that’s a great goal.  I posted 69 times to my blog in 2008.  I think an additional 31 posts is doable.

3. Waste less energy on stuff that doesn’t matter.

Basically, I’m going to try and not sweat the small stuff this year.  Too many people get worked up over things that, in the end, really don’t matter.

4. Continue my community involvement

This includes putting on the upcoming Ann Arbor Give Camp, supporting my “local” (within an hour) user groups by attending / speaking, attending regional technical events and more fundraising for worthy charities.

5. Be healthier

This really means doing more to get off my ass during the day instead of sitting behind my computer for 12+. 

Sarah’s pictures
Dave’s pictures
Jeff’s pictures
Alan’s pictures

Codemash 2009 marked my 1-year anniversary of really being out in the community.  Last March, I wrote a post titled “See what happens when geeks socialize?” that described my evolution in the community.  I have come so much farther and made so many new friends and connections since that post that Codemash 2009 was more of a family reunion for me than anything else.

On Tuesday the 6th, exactly a week after my surgery, I hopped in a car with Jason Farrell and Chris Roland to make the 2 1/2 hour drive to The Kalahari.  My plan was to get there in time for a 7pm meeting with the heartland evangelists (Brian, Jeff and Jennifer) and then hang out with my friends before the Precompiler event on Wednesday.  Since I’m helping to plan a couple major events in the region this year, the influencer meeting was informative, and it was great to see and talk to everyone.  We did have a scare when we found out that the car Leon was driving (passengers were DaveD and Dan) went off the road.  After a few hours in the hospital making sure everyone was ok, they finally arrived at the hotel around midnight.

Chris roomed with me Tuesday night, so after all the festivities, we ended up talking until after 3am.  Good stuff.

Wednesday’s Precompiler event was really cool.  I started out in Joe O’Brien and Jim Weirich’s Ruby session.  I absolutely loved the approach they took.  Essentially, we were given a set of failing unit tests and had to fix them.  After getting through a few of the exercises, I bailed so I could wander around and see what else was going on.  After lunch, I ended up bouncing between the “codejam” session and Leon’s TDD session.   During the TDD session, I ended up working a bit with Mike Wood.  I also jumped into a conversation Leon was having with a couple “students” and the next thing I know, it was just me and the 2 attendees.  Leon later said that he could see I had things under control and he was more than happy to move on and help others.

At one point, a few of us (James, Nate, Mike, Corey and Jay) from ##twittertribe sat down for some hacking on a project.  I’m not sure where the project will go, or if anyone will continue to work on it, but it was cool to sit down and talk through things with those guys.  We hung out later in the bar and talked about all sorts of stuff….basically an extension of what we talk about every day in IRC.

Wednesday night was a bit crazy.  Not only did a lot of my friends show up, but my family also arrived.  While my family got settled in and hit the water park, a bunch of started…umm….consuming adult beverages.  After a few hours hanging out with Alan and  some other friends in Alan’s room, I hit the SRT party and then headed back to Alan’s room to chill out before finally making it back to my suite around 3am.  It was great talking to everyone, including the guy that I credit for starting it all: Dustin.

Thursday saw the start of the event as well as the opening circle for the open spaces event.  I spent most of my time hanging out and talking to friends.  For some reason, I wasn’t as excited about the open spaces as I hoped.  Right after the opening circle, I had breakfast with Alan, Jeff and Sara Ford (name drop!).  Overall, Thursday was about talking to friends and reconnecting.

Thursday night was spent “adult beverage free” at the vendor party and then back in Alan’s room for some excellent conversation and music.  I love listening to both Alan and Corey sing and both did their share.

Friday I sat in a great open space about community.  I was surprised by how many people consider the community to be “user groups”.  I called BS on this pretty quickly and tried to steer the discussion to things other than user groups.  We talked a bit about Give Camps and impromtu discussions via skype/irc and IM.  Skype and IRC have become my lifelines over the past few months.  After that, I attended a lunch with the evangelists, a bunch of community members (my friends) and the head of DP&E in the US (Mark Hindsbo – does he seriously not have a blog?).  It ended up being, IMO, a pretty interesting and productive discussion.

The closing circle for open spaces was….well…..different.  Alan structured things a bit different from DevLink so in order to talk, you had to have the “talking stick”…well, in our case, it was Sarah’s code monkey, but still, you get the point.  The giveaways were cool, but I didn’t win anything, so not much to say about it.

Friday night was once again spent with friends, hanging out and talking about a variety of topics.  I met Chris Smith and had a cool discussion about F# before Corey started playing Neil Young.   At that point, all conversations are done for me.

We finally got home around 3pm on Saturday.

I had a hell of a good time and want to thank all the organizers and sponsors of the event.  Codemash continues to get better with each passing year.  I’ve already got the dates for Codemash 2010 on my calendar!

1. Top N lists.
2. Stupid people.
3. Expert Sex Change
4. Everyone is an expert
5. Spam
6. Stupid people
7. Repetition
8. Not enough free porn
9. People that get pissed off over silly stuff

I was going to write my standard end of the year wrap-up post, but given some recent events, I want to look forward rather than back.  Of course, after saying that, I do want to briefly talk about the last few days of 2008.

If you follow me on twitter, you saw this tweet on Sunday:

“Been at the hospital since 2:30am (ER). Was admitted around 6:30am and will be here for the next 2 days because of this http://is.gd/dRbM”

On Tuesday morning around 9:15, my gallbladder was removed by an excellent surgical team and then I spent the next 24 hours recovering.  During this time, I was taken care of by a great nursing staff, including someone I graduated high school with.   I was discharged on Wednesday morning and then I spent New Year’s Eve with my wife, kids and some friends playing games.  It’s been a crazy few days, but thankfully things are finally getting back to normal. 

I’m really looking forward to 2009.  In the short term, I’m looking forward to attending Codemash next week and seeing all my friends again.  In the longer term, the latter half of 2008 has kept me extremely busy and I hope to be just as busy all of 2009. I have an upcoming announcement regarding business, but it’ll probably wait until next week.  I had a great time speaking last year and definitely plan to develop new topics and continue presenting at user groups and events throughout the year.

Due to a screwup at a domain registrar (not godaddy — more in another post), I decided to move my blog to a new domain: http://mjeaton.net!  Please let me know if you find any issues.

The old feed is hosed, but will hopefully come back when the registrar pulls their head out of their ass. :-\ 

new feed

Update: 12/14/2008 @ 8:01 pm (Eastern): Old feed is up.

A few weeks ago, for no other reason than I had a few minutes to spare, I decided to setup a new twitter account that would be used to report build status on one of my projects.  I initially wanted to post the build status to my primary twitter account, but after mentioning it in a tweet (and receiving some negative feedback), I decided a separate account would be better.  After a quick search, I found this post by Thomas Freudenberg which described exactly what I needed: a twitter build publisher for CruiseControl.NET.  I did find a couple others in my search, but none as simple as ‘ccnet.TwitterPublisher.plugin’.

After downloading the source, building it, copying the required assembly to my ccnet folder and adding the relevant section to my ccnet.config file, I was up and running.  I realized pretty quickly that I’d need to make some changes because out of the box, the tweet contains the project name and a link back to the ccnet dashboard.  Since this is tied to a client project I’m working on, all I really wanted to display was “build was successful” or “build failed”.  If this was for a more public project, I’d definitely leave those other pieces of information in place.  I would like to add more information to the tweet, but I haven’t quite figured out how to get the information I want.  For example, I’d love for the tweet to include # tests run / # tests passed.

Changing the code was actually really simple and if people care, I can post my changes.

My build status twitter account.

Anyway, I’ve found that I’m definitely more careful before commit’s because the last thing I want is to see “build failed” come across on twitter.

I’ve heard about Balsamiq Mockups, but after seeing this tweet (“FYI, Balsamiq rocks for UI mock ups. Thanks @joeybeninghove for showing it to me!“) by Joel, I had to take a look.

I spent about 15 minutes using it and love it!  I was in analysis paralysis last night and needed to break out of it.  Basically, I created a screen that sucks – it’s fugly and not intuitive at all and I needed to fix it.  Instead of hacking around in Visual Studio trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I hit the Balsamiq site and very quickly laid out what I think I want the screen to be.  The cool thing is that the output looks like I sketched it in pencil.

I’ve always been a big fan of pencil and paper for initial screen design because it helps me focus.  My problem with that method is that if I want to show anyone, I need to scan the paper and then email it — this was no big deal up until my scanner died about a month ago.   With Balsamiq, I can quickly and easily save the design to an image file.

I plan on using over the next couple of weeks to produce some prototypes for another client.

Check it out if you get some time!