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?).

As you can probably guess from the title – I’m openly looking for opportunities to speak at user groups and conferences – it’s something I’ve always been interested in and I’d absolutely love to do. I have a few things I’d potentially like to talk about – from my previous post you can probably tell I’m a massive advocate of learning – we work in an industry subject to Moore’s law. We can never be too clued up nor would we want to be out of the loop.

I previously submitted the following session for the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 8 conference and would be more than happy to present it at your local user group and / or conference if it sounds like something you and your attendees may be interested in:

Learning the ‘right’ way

There are many different methods of learning how to develop, design and manage
effectively, efficiently and do things in the ‘right’ way. This begs the
question – what is the ‘right’ way?
Is it via reading books, reading blogs, or not reading at all?
Is it via pair-programming, code reviews, and how does this affect the
learning process?
In this session, Daniel May will be going over the common ways to learn a new
language, pattern or aspect of development and design, and suggesting
improvements and recommendations to these methods.
Subjects covered will include learning from books including publication choices
and recommendations, learning via pair-programming and code reviews, learning in
the workplace with internships, official Microsoft training (.NET) and much
more.

This is the only session I have a complete (ie 100% finished) presentation for – however I am able to create session agendas for the following subjects; “Beginning Silverlight Development from a WPF background”, “Best Practices – Just how ‘best’ are they?” and “Learning to not dread fridays”. All of these are sessions in progress at the moment and I’d be more than happy to finish them off in due time should there be a demand for them.

If you are interested in any of these sessions or have any questions, please do not hesitate send me a mail at daniel[at]danielmay.co.uk. (Note: This isn’t only open to opportunities in the UK!)

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.