Blankenthoughts

Thank you to everyone that participated in my blogging contest. In all, we had 43 entries (some of them were emailed, for some reason). That's a solid 1/3 of my readership (as of today).

Now for the big news....the winner. I took each entry and added it to an Excel spreadsheet. Once I had them all input, I used the random number generator function in Excel (=RANDBETWEEN(1, 43)).

The winner of my 2008 Codemash Blogging Contest, and the SwagBag to rule them all is...

Jay Wren.

I will be giving this bag away at CodeMash this afternoon.

Keep an eye out for my next contest...coming in February.

Labels: codemash, jay wren, jeff blankenburg, swagbag

The bag is packed. Let me just say that much has been added since I discussed the contents of this SwagBag. Special thanks to Tim Heuer for reading about the contest and contributing some stuff of his own.

You've got until Thursday morning to get your entry in. We've only got 36 entries right now. I'd like to see fifty before Thursday morning. And my offer still stands...if we can get to 100, I'll thrown in an 8GB Zune.

Here's the post:

http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/2007/12/codemash-contest_19.html

Labels: codemash, jeff blankenburg, swagbag

In an unfortunate turn of events, Jesse Liberty (Senior Program Manager, Silverlight Development Team) fractured his shoulder a few weeks ago. He and his doctor were optimistic that he would still be able to make the trip to CodeMash (like I'm sure all of you are). His surgeon is now extremely reluctant to have him in full-on travel mode just yet, so he has been forced to cancel his trip.

Due to these circumstances, there is a gaping hole in the Silverlight content at CodeMash. I have been fortunate enough to be asked by Jesse to replace him in his absence. I'm a bit honored, and a bit panicked (I wasn't on the slate to speak until now). So there you have it....I'll be the speaker in Jesse Liberty's stead. The topics will still be the same, there will be an Intro to Silverlight and an Advanced Silverlight session at the normally scheduled time.

So, if I haven't met you, and certainly if I have, here's when I will be speaking at CodeMash.

01/09/07 9:30 AM - Coding In Silverlight
01/10/07 2:10 PM - Advanced Silverlight

Head over to the CodeMash Session Scheduler (built in Silverlight) and get me on your agenda!

Labels: codemash, jeff blankenburg, jesse liberty, Silverlight

This is just a reminder to the 140 subscribers I have that HAVEN'T entered my contest...you've got 7 days left.

Read this post...enter to win a pile of stuff. It's 10 minutes of your time for what is becoming THOUSANDS of dollars of gear.

What's holding you back?

http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/2007/12/codemash-contest_19.html

Labels: codemash, jeff blankenburg

Today, the last day of 2007, I'm making my 100th blog post. And, yes it's about CodeMash.

Perhaps some of you missed my post on the CodeMash contest I am running. Maybe some of you didn't get around to it yet. And I'm betting some of you are just being stubborn. Regardless of the reason, I've got 5 entries so far, and was expecting for something more in the 100ish range. We've got some work to do.

As a recap, I'm running a contest about CodeMash. I want everyone that reads this to create some enthusiastic content about CodeMash. Make it meaningful. Let your excitement show. And once you've posted it on the web, leave a comment on this post with a link to yours.

The deadline to get them in is the event itself. January 10, 2008 at 8:00 AM. Each and every entry that is listed in my comments will be entered in a drawing for a SwagBag. I'm not going to disclose the contents of the bag, I'm only going to assure you that it will be well worth your while to enter.

Also, each person that enters will get a small something. Just come find me at the event (Microsoft will have a booth) and introduce yourself. If you had a post in my comments, I'll give it to you right then and there.

In addition, if we can get 100 blog posts (from 100 people, you cheater) on this list, I will guarantee that there will be a Zune 8GB in the SwagBag in addition to everything else it will contain.

So get writing. And if you don't like writing...make a video. Or a song. Or a poem. Or a photo collage. The medium doesn't matter, as long as we can get it on the web to share with everyone else.

Here's a little incentive:

Here's just part of the list of things that will be in the SwagBag on January 10.

Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 2000
Microsoft Office Professional 2007
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate
Halo 3 for the Xbox 360
1GB USB Flash Drive
"Heroes Happen Here" fleece/nylon jacket
.NET t-shirt
Microsoft Visual Studio Hat

And like I said before, if I get 100 entries, I'll add an 8GB Zune to the bag as well. So tell your friends, and get to posting!

Labels: codemash

You're reading this post, so clearly you have enough time to write your own.

Here's what I've got planned for my loyal readers...

A CodeMash enthusiasm contest.





I want to make sure that we're spreading the word about CodeMash, and the amazing event that it is. For those of you that were there last year, let's hear about it. For those of you that weren't...let's hear what you're hoping to get from it this year. I want to crush the web under the weight of the enthusiasm for this conference.

---

Haven't heard of CodeMash? Go to http://www.codemash.org and get registered!

CodeMash is a technology conference taking place in Sandusky, OH in just a few weeks. It is taking place January 10-11, 2008 at the Kalahari resort.

The purpose of the conference is very unique. The idea is to give software developers from all of the different technologies and platforms an opportunity to learn from one another. For example, I learned quite a bit from Neal Ford and Bruce Eckel last year, two noted Java enthusiasts.

We have so much in common in what we are trying to accomplish with our respective technologies, that sometimes we only focus on our differences. OOP is OOP. Plain and simple. So why do we keep our distances? Let's take an open-minded approach to software development, and perhaps learning a bit about Ruby, Python, .NET, Java or others will help us to better understand the technologies we are most familiar with.

---

So...on to the contest. I want everyone that reads this to create some enthusiastic content about CodeMash. Make it meaningful. Let your excitement show. And once you've posted it on the web, leave a comment on this post with a link to yours.

The deadline to get them in is the event itself. January 10, 2008 at 8:00 AM. Each and every entry that is listed in my comments will be entered in a drawing for a SwagBag. I'm not going to disclose the contents of the bag, I'm only going to assure you that it will be well worth your while to enter.

Also, each person that enters will get a small something. Just come find me at the event (Microsoft will have a booth) and introduce yourself. If you had a post in my comments, I'll give it to you right then and there.

In addition, if we can get 100 blog posts (from 100 people, you cheater) on this list, I will guarantee that there will be a Zune 8GB in the SwagBag in addition to everything else it will contain.

So get writing. And if you don't like writing...make a video. Or a song. Or a poem. Or a photo collage. The medium doesn't matter, as long as we can get it on the web to share with everyone else.

Labels: blogging, codemash, jeff blankenburg, swagbag

Here's the second release of speakers for the CodeMash conference coming up on January 9-11, 2008. The bar continues to get higher...

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Leah Culver: "Getting Started with Django"
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Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as a way of sending messages, links, files and events to each other. Leah is the lead developer for the site, which has become one of the largest sites using the Django framework Leah loves the challenge of developing a web application from scratch and writes about her experiences as a software developer at leahculver.com.

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Kevin Dangoor: "Overview of the Dojo JavaScript Toolkit"
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Kevin Dangoor is the product manager at SitePen and the founder of the TurboGears open source web application framework. He has held positions in software development, management and sales engineering. He has previously spoken at CodeMash, PyCon, EuroPython and GLSEC and is the co-author of the book "Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears".

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Catherine Devlin: "Crash, Smash, Kaboom Course in Python"
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After a wasted youth studying chemical engineering, Catherine Devlin accidentally became a database administrator in 1999 and began tying web applications to her databases almost immediately. She works for IntelliTech Systems at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, programming and maintaining small-scale, database-centered web applications.

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Keith Elder: "Introduction to WFF" and "Building Custom Workflow Activities"
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Keith Elder is a Team Leader / Sr. Software Engineer for Quicken Loans, the nation's largest online mortgage lender based in Livonia, MI. At Quicken Loans he is the team leader, lead developer and architect for a custom built in-house Smart Client CRM (client relationship management) application. As a Microsoft MVP he speaks throughout the South and Midwestern parts of the United States at various Code Camps, .Net User Groups, technical conferences and schools.

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Joe O'Brien: "Ruby - Testing Mandatory"
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Before helping found EdgeCase, LLC, Joe O'Brien was a developer with
ThoughtWorks and spent much of his time working with large J2EE and .NET systems for Fortune 500 companies. He has spent his career as a developer, project manager, and everything in between. Joe is a passionate member of the open source community. He co-founded the Columbus Ruby Brigade and helped organize the Chicago Area Ruby Users Group. His passions are Agile Development in the Enterprise, Ruby, and demonstrating to the Fortune 500 the elegance and power of this incredible language.

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Jay Pipes: "Performance Coding Techniques for MySQL"
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Jay Pipes is the North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL. Author of Pro MySQL, Jay has also written articles for Linux Magazine and regularly assists software developers in identifying how to make the most effective use of MySQL. He has given sessions on performance tuning at the MySQL Users Conference, RedHat Summit, NY PHP Conference, OSCON and Ohio LinuxFest, among others. In his abundant free time, when not being pestered by his two needy cats and two noisy dogs, he daydreams in PHP code and ponders the ramifications of __clone().

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Brian Sam-Bodden: "Rails: A Peek Under the Covers" and "Bitter Java? Sweeten with JRuby!"
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Brian Sam-Bodden is the author of two Java titles; a frequent speaker at
national and international conferences, a professional trainer and a
full-time member of the NoFluffJustStuff symposiums. Brian is passionate
about clean, concise and understandable software and enjoys hacking away with Java and Ruby.

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Chris Judd: "Agile Development with Groovy and Grails"
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Christopher Judd is the president and primary consultant for Judd Solutions, LLC. (www.juddsolutions.com), international speaker, open source evangelist, Central Ohio Java Users Group (www.cojug.org) coordinator and co-author of "Enterprise Java Development on a Budget" and "Pro Eclipse JST". He has spent ten years developing software in the insurance, retail, government, manufacturing, service, and transportation industries. His current focus is consulting, mentoring and training with Java, J2EE, J2ME, web services and related technologies.

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James Ward: "RIAs - Beyond the Buzz"
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James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe and Adobe's JCP
representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early 90's; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid 90's; then Java and many of its frameworks beginning in the late 90's. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front-ends for Java based back-ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.

Labels: codemash

So the speaker list is being announced for CodeMash in phases. This post features the first round of selections. Based on the quality of this round of speakers alone, I'd say we're in for an amazing conference.

Bruce Eckel: "Why I Love Python"
Bruce Eckel has given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences. He provides public and private seminars & design consulting in OO Design, Python, Java and C++.

Neal Ford: "Engineering and Polyglot Programming" and "DSLs in Static & Dynamic Languages"
Neal Ford is an senior application architect at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy. His primary consulting focus is the building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at numerous developers conferences worldwide.

Jesse Liberty: "Coding in Silverlight"
Jesse Liberty is a Senior Program Manager for Microsoft's Silverlight
Development Team. He is a former Distinguished Software Engineer at AT&T and
Vice President for technology development at CitiBank, and was an
independent consultant for 12 years.

Dick Wall: "Testing with Guice"
Dick Wall is a software engineer at Google, based in Mountain View. He also
co-hosts the Java Posse podcast-a regular Java-centric news and interviews
show that can be found at http://javaposse.com.

Jim Weirich: "Advanced Ruby Class Design"
Jim Weirich has over twenty-five years of experience in software
development, and is employed with EdgeCase. He has worked with real-time
data systems for testing jet engines, networking software for information
systems, and image processing software for the financial industry. Weirich
is active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby
projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.

Labels: codemash

      

So I know I just got back from an amazing conference in CodeMash, but I've got great news! I'm heading to Mix 07 at the end of April, thanks to the good folks at Quick Solutions. Brian Prince and the rest of the management team do nothing but support me and my technical growth. I can't thank them enough for the opportunities they have provided me.

It's taking place in the Venetian Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, NV from April 30 - May 2, 2007. I'll actually be heading out the morning of the 29th, and flying home to Columbus on May 3rd, so it should make for an exhausting trip. Based on the preliminary schedule of events, here's how I see my schedule going down:

April 29, 2006
7:00 AM - Get to the Columbus Airport, check in, go through security checkpoints, recover from cavity search.
9:00 AM - Take the flight to Sin City.
10:38 AM - Arrive in Las Vegas. We are now operating on Vegas time people, keep up.
10:39 AM - Lose my first $10 in a slot machine.
11:00 AM - Check in to the Venetian Hotel & Casino.
11:30 AM - Lose another $50 at the blackjack table.
12:00 PM - Grab some lunch.
12:45 PM - Wander the hotel, getting my bearings on where registration, session rooms, etc. are.
4:00 PM - Head over the registration, get checked in for the event.
5:00 PM - Sit down for a long night of Texas Hold-em at the Bellagio Poker Room (or maybe the Venetian Poker Room, it looks to be new)


April 30, 2006
1:00 AM - Go to bed.
8:30 AM - Head down to the Continental Breakfast. Mingle. Meet some people.
9:30 AM - Head over the Keynotes session. Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie are expected to be speaking. I really enjoyed Scott's talks at CodeMash, so I hope there is new material for Mix.
12:00 PM - Lunch
1:30 PM - Time for some sessions.


Um, I expected this blog post to be longer, but it doesn't appear that they have decided which sessions will be in which time slots. So, of the sessions that are listed on the site currently, here are the ones I expect to attend:


LINQing Your Web Applications - See how Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) allows for the most seamless integration of your Web applications and relational data. Get a sneak peek at the next version of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio (codenamed “Orcas”).

Driving Your Business through User Experience - Hear how tools, technologies and cutting edge design combine to create the user experiences that drive your business. See how a continuum of user experiences can be a powerful lever to differentiate the products and services you offer via the Web.

Gazing into the Future of Web Development - Be one of the first to see the big advances planned for the next version of ASP.NET for building rich Web applications. Get a sneak peek at technology to help simplify rich content, data, services and more. Learn how to efficiently and effectively create data-driven applications that fully leverage the power of “WPF/E” and AJAX on the client coupled with powerful server-side features provided by ASP.NET.

Thinking in CSS: How to Build Great Looking Sites - Delve into CSS with Molly Holzschlag, and look at the power CSS offers to Web developers and designers. Hear Molly's secrets about how to build stunning sites quickly and easily.

Five Real World Applications that Raise the Bar for User Experience - Come learn about five applications that will change what your customers will expect from tomorrow’s software applications.

IE7 Retrospective: Microsoft's Look at the Good, Bad and Ugly - Hear from Microsoft's IE7 team about the journey from mea culpa to broad market acceptance. Hear what went right, what had to be cut, and how development priorities are set. Learn how to minimize your Web browser support headaches, and move to a more standardized Web.

There are plenty more sessions planned, and my preference may change once I see which sessions are in which time slots. Expect to see many more posts about this in the near future. And for those of you that want me to put $1 on Red 32 for you while I'm there, start saving your pennies.

Labels: brian prince, codemash, CSS, drew robbins, HTML, IE7, jeff blankenburg, las vegas, linq, microsoft, mix, mix 07, poker, ray ozzie, scott guthrie, venetian, WPF, WPF/E

Codemash. What can I say? This is the first community-driven event I have ever attneded, and I have been blown away by the quality of the attendees here. I have had an opportunity to talk with Microsoft influencers (Drew Robbins, Josh Holmes, Jennifer Marsman, you have all been great, and it's been an absolute pleasure to spend some time talking and working with each of you), community leaders (Todd Kaufman [on the board of COJUG], Rob Stevenson [part of the Columbus Ruby Brigade], and many more), as well as thought leaders in people like Neal Ford, Bruce Eckel, and Scott Guthrie.

Events like this inspire me because it's a constant reminder that I need to keep moving forward in my "commitment to a lifetime of education". I've never mentioned this concept in my blog before, but it basically comes down to this: As an individual in the software development field, I have a choice. I can either commit to a lifetime of learning the new "thing", the new technology, the new way of doing things...or I can be left behind, to become extinct. Just like the carpenter that foo-fooed the hammer, those who mock the future of software development are destined to not be a participant.

I hope that Day 2 is nearly as eye-opening as Day 1. I am having an absolutely amazing (and most of all educational) experience. Codemash!

Labels: codemash, commitment to education, drew robbins, java, jeff blankenburg, jennifer marsman, josh holmes, microsoft, rob stevenson, ruby, todd kaufman

Ok, technically, it's not until tomorrow, but with all of the activities I'll be involved in tomorrow at CodeMash, I figured I'd write this one tonight.

I have two tools that I did not have the opportunity to contribute to the book, but I feel need to be mentioned because I use them both in almost every day of my professional life. They are Screen Ruler, and Pixie.

Screen Ruler
Screen Ruler is a TINY application with huge power. It was created by MicroFox. It comes in the form of an 85K zip file. Basically, it's a ruler for your screen. Whether you're an interface developer working through an intricate CSS layout, or just very particular about your spacing, this is absolutely the best application I have found for measuring things, both on screen and off.



The best part of it is that you can use as an on-screen measuring stick, as well as off-screen. I was recently tasked with creating all of the labels for the CodeMash conference, using Avery (no, they don't deserve a link, and that's for another post...) labels. In order to determine what the dimensions of the margins were for these labels, I kicked open Screen Ruler (changing the units to Inches), and measured the document right on my screen, holding the paper up to my monitor. An absolutely brilliant application, with the versatility I am looking for in most applications. And the developer is based in Columbus, OH! When I bought my official license, he actually hand-delivered it to my house on a CD. If that's not customer support, I don't know what is. I could not get by without this application on a daily basis.

Pixie (though I call it Color Pixie)
The second most valuable tool for an interface developer: Pixie, by Nattysoft. This application is even smaller than Screen Ruler. 62K. Unbelievable. Anyways, it provides the ability to determine the Hex, HTML, RGB, CMYK, AND HGB color of any area of your screen. It also displays the pixel position of your mouse in real-time, so you can use it as a measuring tool as well for those hard to reach areas.

It even has built in shortcut keys to copy and paste those colors to your Clipboard for pasting into your code, as well as zooming and color mixing. Valuable tools when you are trying to create a CSS layout from a JPG from your web designer.

In short, these are two small applications that I use daily. I can't recommend them enough, and though I'm sure their creators would be glad to let me, the applications have been worth 10 times their price over my career. I have registered versions of each, and I think the modest prices that these talented developers ask for their software is MORE than reasonable.

Hooray for Windows Developer Powere Tools! I'm on page 1123. :)

Labels: blankenburg, codemash, color picker, microfox, nattyware, o'reilly, pixie, screen ruler, windows developer power tools