Random .NET Ramblings

Ok, I admit it, I have gone seriously dark in the last month but I have been busy. On April 12th I started a new job at MindTouch a PHP/Mono Open source company in San Diego. The general reaction has been WTF! I think this reaction stems from those who have always known me with my Microsoft hat. I still consider myself a Visual Studio/.NET/C# fan boy however, and many of the developers here at MindTouch use Visual Studio. My role at MindTouch is primarily product management, well okay I am the Product Manager, and while I intend to earn check in rights, I have not yet had time to install Visual Studio on my box.

How did I get hooked up with MindTouch? Well, I met Aaron Fulkerson and Steve Bjorg while I was at Microsoft and focused on startups. During that time I tried to find funding to have a white paper written about the experience MindTouch had while creating a Windows installer for their commercial product. I wanted to focus on how the experience gained a lot of new downloads for MindTouch. I found the story about how Microsoft has made efforts to make PHP a first class option on Windows and the market opportunity that Windows has for developers fascinating. Unfortunately no one found the idea as interesting as me and I was not able to find anyone who had the guts to pay for the white paper. Things happen?

So what does MindTouch do? I will let this outstanding video that Mike Diliberto created for the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad contest:

How has my community role changed you ask? My role has not changed at all and I remain extremely involved. I am still helping with SoCal Code Camps and the San Diego .NET Developers Group. In addition I have recently taken over as the SoCal INETA Membership Mentor which allows me to help all of the local INETA user groups.

Now that you know where I have been over the last month I would like to close with my commitment to you to start blogging about work on the MindTouch Blog. I will cross post summary here just so you can see what I am up to. My blog will now have a much more community and personal focus.

Until next time?.

As I said in my post "OK Its Official Now". When I was unemployed and between Microsoft and Neudesic I set some simple commitments to keep me motivated and more importantly to simply ensure I got out of bed each day. One of the commitments was to read a non-technical book a day. I came across some great reads during this time and I would like to share them with you. So, in no particular order here is a list and a few comments.

	Software Product Management Essentials ~ Alyssa Dver
	Software Requirements: Practical Techniques for Gathering and Managing Requirements Throughout the Product Development Cycle. ~ Karl E. Wiegers
	More About Software Requirements: Thorny Issues and Practical Advice ~ Karl Eugene Wiegers
	Infoenza: Why Projects Fail And How To Fix Them ~ Troy Malone Troy is a buddy that started Pelotonics a cool project & group management site. He produced this book which is a very cool short read.
	Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project ~ Karl Fogel This was an interesting read and changed how I would run any project.
	This Man's Army ~ Andrew Exum I am not much of a fan of ?war? books but looking to get some perspective on our current conflicts I picked this one up. Andrew provides some terrific insight. A second book in this same genre that provided additional context was The Middle East ~ Bernard Lewis.
	Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain ~ John J. Ratey , Eric Hagerman
	The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich ~ Timothy Ferriss Wow is what I say, each time I read this book. I can?t believe how much I get out of it! Note: it looks like there is a new and expanded version of this book but I have not read it but if you are getting it new I would check it out.
	The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference ~ Malcolm Gladwell
	The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary National Bestseller That Changed The Way We Do Business ~ Clayton M. Christensen This is quite an interesting read. My father had given it to me a while back but I had not found the time to sit down and read it until now. I highly recommend it to anyone who is trying to implement something new inside of an existing organization.
	The Definitive Book of Body Language ~ Barbara Pease
	Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity ~ David Allen All I can say is from the day at BarCamp LA where Heather introduced me to this book in her amazing session on GTD I have tried to live the GTD way (often failing). This book has helped me tremendously!
	The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life ~ Erving Goffman I can?t say enough about this book. I read this book for the first time when my wife was getting her sociology degree. In fact, I read all of her books when she was in school and this one and one from her Fundamental Forms of Religion class were the most interesting books from her four years at school (for me at least). I reread this one every few years to simply remind me why we humans do the stupid things we do!

So feel free to let me know about your favorite books. I want to keep up my reading momentum. Now that I am not receiving hundreds of emails a day I have much more time to read.

Well, I have landed but before I talk about where let me tell you what I have been doing with myself. November 11th was technically my last day with Microsoft but the 6th was my hard deadline for completing all projects. The weekend of the 7th my son and I had a campout planned with the Webelos. This campout was not only a great bonding weekend with my son, but it proved to be very enlightening for me personally as well. I took the opportunity to speak with several of the Dad?s many who had experienced their own layoffs over the years. I learned a lot and I returned home with some new personal commitments to keep me busy during my transition.

These commitments included:

1. I would never eat lunch alone.
   • This commitment would allow me to work my professional networks and it turned out to be a great way to capitalize on a lot of free lunches.
2. I would read one non-technical book per day.
   • This was a huge thing for me. I just don?t do non-geek well but I really wanted to take the opportunity to stretch myself.
3. I would apply for one new job each day and talk to someone about a job every day.
   • This commitment slipped quickly as I knew what I would be doing fairly soon.

So how did I do?

With #1 I am happy to report except for one day I had lunch with someone every day. Okay, well yes, I am counting a few with my wife as ?with someone?. This goal was a lot of fun and did open up some interesting opportunities. I plan to continue this commitment at some level even while working. I hope to have lunch with someone outside my organization at least once a week but I will try for twice a week.

Commitment #2 was by far the most challenging. Not the reading part, but finding books that I wanted to read proved to be difficult. My goal was to read professional or personal development books but man, there are a lot of crap books out there! By far my favorite book was my reread of The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. This book will remain nearby as I plan to read it often! Next was my reread of Getting Things Done by David Allen. This book sparked me to re-GTD myself and this time I did it in my home office. Wow, everyone needs to pick up a copy of this book and more importantly DO IT! I read many other books, so many I had to start going to the library as my wife did not like all of the Amazon boxes piling up. I will try to do a post on my favorites soon.

Well, with #3 I did a good job for the first week but as several offers seemed to come in quite quickly I spent my time focusing on them.

Now the big news and the reason for this post! I am now happily employed at Neudesic. w00t! While searching for a new employment opportunity I passed up several programming consulting offers in favor of looking for a company that met both my personal and professional goal to get back to being more product focused. I wanted to develop products.

Neudesic offered me quite an exciting job and an interesting title as well. I am now Director of Product Incubation where I will be responsible for the initial justification (product research proofs of concepts and initial implementation) of product ideas for Neudesic. Neudesic has already started to work on two different product concepts and I will immediately dive into these. I am super excited to have been given this opportunity and Neudesic has been incredibly supportive. The people I have met have been outstanding!

So, that is it? I am back working and again loving what I do! Thank you to all who had let me know you were thinking of me and who helped me find all the different opportunities.

It has been a short-down time but I can tell I will go stir-crazy quickly if I don't get back to working soon. The pace at Microsoft was so intense that having little to do has been a shock to my system. I still am not sure what I would like to do, but I am going to begin talking to people about possibilities.

I do know I what want is some place where I can have real impact. With my background, I am fortunate that I have been able to do so many things. At Microsoft I enjoyed that I was able to bring my diverse background to develop and execute programs and projects. I am now a strange hybrid developer, program manager and project manager with great presentation skills.

Suggestions?

Today Microsoft announced another round of layoffs and I was included. It was totally unexpected and there was no explanation other than the (I am sure legally vetted) ?reorganize and restructure? answer. I am sure this is how they have handled past layoffs and if you look at the group I am in I can understand how the job I was doing was redundant, if I were management I could see selecting this position for removal. I had a counterpart doing the same job in NorCal and that is the market that Microsoft is more concerned with. I have looked at the current positions Microsoft has open in SoCal and decided not to apply as I would not be a good fit for them. So that leaves me with some thinking to do?

I will brush-up the resume but I really want to take some time to think about what?s next for me and my family. I am sure I will find many interesting opportunities and at least one that I will be excited about. My goal is to find something where I can make big contributions to ensure the success of an organization.

My network access and email will be shut off soon so you can reach me through this blog or use my gmail address or send a note on facebook or twitter @woodyp.

Thank you to all of the great people I was able to work with at Microsoft, I will look forward to seeing you all in the developer community soon.

Today I at Startup Weekend LA and so while I am up in Los Angeles where should I eat? Pink’s of course… OK so this was the first time that while close I had the time and motivation to wait in the line (I am told it’s always at least a 30 minute wait) and wow was it worth it!

I had a basic a Bacon Chili Dog and fries and now I am totally craving a Poli Bacon Burrito Dog! While there some “famous” guy walked up of course I am so out of it that I did not know who he was but a bunch of people in line got pictures with him while we all waited (he waited like the rest of us, I thought that was quite cool of him, I just looked him up it was Donald Faison). If you ever find yourself close to Pink’s I totally suggest you give it a try, I may find myself down there again this weekend!

I was tagged by “Mr. Denny” Denny Cherry in his post My First Computer and as much as I hate the whole tagging thing his post got me thinking so I decided to do this post (dam you Denney!)

The first computer that I could call mine was a TRS-80 Color Computer to be precise it was the TRS-80 Color Computer 1 16k Model E motherboard and I had the available tape cassette storage. After having for a year or two I even saved up and got an external add-on speech synthesizer but my parents would not let me get the 300 baud  modem (I hated them for that for a long time).

I wanted to get a computer for along time because I would use my uncle computer (not sure I think a TRS-80 Model III) but my aunt and I would have issues with power. Every time she would use the hair dryer and I had the commuter on it would pop a circuit breaker and they did not have kids so did not have too much tolerance for some punk kid but they handled me better than I would handled me ;). So I nagged and nagged  my dad and being the PHD he is he thought he would put be off for a few years and require me to know how to do differential equations but that only lasted 3 months. He was good to his word and the weekend after I answered several equations for him he researched the computers on the market and I had my CoCo!

I spent many an hour in our windowless guest room\office programming and hacking on this computer with the help of the “Rainbow” Magazine... wow I am going back now I could not afford to get the debugging kit for the computer that would let me get around the BASIC environment so I rewrote the machine code on the box so I could stuff more in to the 16k and later the 32k piggy backed memory felt totally cavernous.

I wrote a lot if car and plane simulations where you could add all types of dimensional variables and I would build different simulators to modal how the car or plane would behave. I recall my dad suggesting I start modeling the road surface so the friction coefficient would come in to play... wow I still remember how hard that was. Later I would even use the UI to graph some of the output values over time but what wowed all my friends was my worm like game where you had to move a worm through a maze, that is where I should have learned that “it’s not how had it is it’s how sexy it looks” but I enjoyed the hard more.

Later my dad got me a IBM clone called Columbia with a 8086 coprocessor and I never looked back at having any type of social life or skills.

And now I tag… no one! If you want to write about your first computer and enjoy the memories like I just did then go for it but don’t tag anyone!

I have been given a new opportunity at Microsoft, for the last three years I have had the position of Developer Evangelist. In that role, I have had the opportunity to work with all the Microsoft focused user groups in Southern California. This has allowed me to work with some of the most local, community-focused people I have had the privilege to know. This was a perfect fit for me as I had been active in running user groups for almost 20 years. As a Developer Evangelist, I also was able to represent Microsoft at events where the attendees were not always the most positive (and often quite hostile) about Microsoft. This included events like JavaOne, OSCON, various BarCamps and many other. I enjoyed each of these engagements, and while I hope I encouraged Microsoft sceptics to have a more open mind to Microsoft, I know that I learned a lot about the startups, entrepreneurs & angel\venture investors. In the past, I have started a product company, two service companies and worked at a product startup but I had never needed to or been able to get involved into the angel\venture investor side of being in a startup. This made the last few years quite interesting and educational.

With the new job I have moved into the Western Region Developer Platform & Evangelism Strategy Team where I will be managed by the only person that objected to me being hired at Microsoft, but I think he is over it now :). The new position will let me work full time with startups, entrepreneurs & investors. I will get to help startups implement or integrate with Microsoft products and services. Once I do what I do, others on my new team will work with the startups to create white papers and case studies that will be used to help produce PR for the startups as well as Microsoft. I don’t know all of the details of my new position, I have a team meeting next week where I will learn more about the job, but I am looking forward to this new opportunity.

The only bummer is that now I will not get to go to Hawaii a few times a year.

Anyone who has ever gotten a ride from me in my car knows a few key things about me:

1. I am a slob!
   • I can't stand to clean my car and it's a wreck inside and out!
2. I love Public Radio

So I was shocked today to be in the car today and hear a show I had never heard before (ok maybe I just never noticed it before). It is called Radio Lab from WNYC, what got my attention was that were doing a story on Lying to Ourselves and the researchers in the story concluded that people who lie to themselfs are happier. The story was entertaining and the conduction sounded way too plausible it's an interesting show and now I know way I am doomed to my fate I am just too damn honest with myself. I guess there are worse things! ;)