Daniel May

So – where do I begin?

I haven’t blogged since late February which is a massive shame I guess, but I think I’ve just found it easier for people to keep up to date with what’s going on with me via my twitter feed (@danielrmay).  Truth be told, I’ve also been extremely busy what with getting myself a (now-not-so-new) job, along with speaking arrangements.

So, what have I been up to in the past few months? Too much.

sharpcloud

I was (un?)fortunately made redundant in early March. This was both a difficult and a very positive time for me – mainly positive due to the vast amount of support I received from my peers, mainly on Twitter. I had quite an interest, completely due to the amount of retweets about me being made redundant – I’m extremely grateful.

It was a hard decision in the end, but I chose sharpcloud as my next employer, taking on a role as an Azure & Silverlight developer. It’s been just under two months, and I’m loving it. Working on some cutting-edge technologies and a completely new, fresh and unique product. I can’t wait to see where sharpcloud goes.

speaking

I’ve had a brilliant few months when it comes to speaking. After only about a month of working of sharpcloud, DevEvening UG in Woking were happy to accomodate a colleague (Joe Wardell) and I speaking about both the architecture and the functionality of the application – which albeit was a bit longer (running over ~20 minutes or so ) than expected, I thought went well.

I also expressed my interest in helping organise and doing a grok talk for DDD Scotland in Glasgow. Had a great time meeting all of the twitter faces and spending quite a bit of time up there and made some really good, new friends. Gave my grok on “Learning the right way” which was a small presentation outlining the ways that we can all learn more effectively, efficiently and how we all need to continue learning to explore how the development industry can change. Had a lot of fun – even if my grok was a little rushed!

Leading on from DDD Scotland, Johan Barnard let me know that the AzureNET UG in London had a speaker drop out and asked if I might be interested. Of course my response was a firm yes and I ended up doing a presentation on the different Gotchas we’ve encountered with Azure at sharpcloud and things that may need to be kept in mind when designing an architecture with Azure.

I’m extremely thankful for having these opportunities – and have recieved some great tips (notably some from Guy Smith Ferrier and Ben Nunney – both of which have proved invaluable).

My next speaking arrangement is at DDD South West in Bristol on 5th June – another grok talk on the new features of Silverlight 4. After that I have the great (and my biggest speaking opportunity so far!) at Epicenter 2010 – doing a whopping 2 70 minute sessions on New Features of Silverlight 4  and Design to development in Silverlight.

Needless to say, I’m extremely happy with the way things are going regarding speaking and I can see myself improving constantly – Epicenter will definitely be interesting.

I’ll try to remember to blog more often than once every two months. Until next time, reader(s?).

I’m gonna talk about myself for the majority of this post, so if you don’t find me interesting – it’s probably not worth your time. Thought I’d warn you.

As many of you know, I’m young. I’m 17 years old with a permanent job in software development – which is rare. I don’t think I’ve come across anyone else with a professional software development job this early on (most probably because all the other teenage nerds are taking the standard college –> uni –> job approach) – but if you’re out there, contact me!

It’s not been easy, but it’s not been particularly hard either. I have been developing actively since I was around 11 years of age, with advice from my father and an introduction to the basics by him. I was instantly interested and wanted to learn more. I loved it. I loved the moment I wrote my first program, to the moment I moved on and wrote my first line of PHP code. It is my passion, and I discovered it at a young age. This is when I first started self-learning.

The first book I ever bought was “Teach yourself VB.NET 2003 in 21 days” – Granted, it was a “XX days” book, but it taught me the basics of what I needed to know. Best 3 weeks of pocket money I’ve ever spent.

I continued to code, moving from VB6 to VB.NET to PHP, including MySQL, playing around with python and various other languages. This kept me busy throughout high school – I scored a number of freelance jobs doing things ranging from data entry to MySQL database design… I daresay I was earning more than the majority of my high school friends, at the price of having next to no social life.  I kept learning through various portals such as online tutorials, problem solving – I was so interested about 90% of my time outside of high school was spent learning for my passion, knowing that at some point it would reward me.

Then came GCSEs. I took a course in DiDA (Diploma in Digital Applications) which I thought would help me carry on to take a computing or programming course at college – it did, but it was nowhere near as technical as I was at that age. Unfortunately, VLOOKUPs in Excel aren’t something I want to be doing for a career – each to their own, though. Albeit bored, I passed these and even got to do some HTML and CSS in the end. Go me.

I finally made it into college and took a computing course – much to my dismay, they were teaching VB6. VB6 in 2008/9. A ten-year-old technology being taught? I can understand the reasons for doing so (simplicity, being eased into development), but was VB6 really the best option? Why not Python? Support for VB6 ended in ‘05, extended support ended in early ‘08. Either way, it was a breeze for me and I was accepted onto the gifted and talented programme. Good stuff. Unfortunately, it was nearing the end of my first year that I decided I didn’t want to do this anymore. I was sick of the constant VB6 re-learning, sick of being miles ahead of my classmates (imagine this as modest as humanly possible). It wasn’t fun and was no longer interesting. I dropped out.

I grabbed myself a few books outlining .NET, compsci concepts, algorithm development and read quite a lot of online blogs – and this helped me reach my first job. A professional .NET development job for someone with purely self-taught knowledge.

It is this that I believe separates me from the crowd. I didn’t go to university. I can’t tell you intrisically how the floating point system works nor can I tell you precisely how the garbage collector in .NET completely works. What I can tell you is that in time, I will know. I will learn these things. Either by myself or via tutoring.

I by no means claim to be an expert. I merely claim that given time and training, I will be. I was born for this.

- Daniel May

I figure I should really use a blog.

I read a lot of blogs myself (I’m actually signed up to 63 feeds via Bloglines (which is excellent by the way) and I find it an excellent way not only to keep in touch with the developer community but also to keep informed and share newly found technologies and information.

So here I go again, I’m giving this whole blogging thing another shot. Hopefully I can attract your attention enough for you to stick around for longer than just a few minutes, and with any luck the things I have to blog about will capture your mind and maybe even teach you a few things.