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?).

DDD stands for DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper – a UK-based developer conference based in Reading.

It’s the first (but by no means the last) conference that I’ve ever offered to speak at, put forward a session or actually attended. Naturally I’m very excited to be in a place with 300+ like minded developers, it’ll be a first for me. It’ll be great to put faces to the twitter names and to meet some of my idols.

I put forward a session for DDD8 because I’ve always been interested in speaking at a conference. For me, I’d love to have this opportunity to show what I know, what I’m good at, what I have a passion for.I saw this at DDD and decided I’d just go for it. I’m by no means an expert in ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, Mono or many of the other things that got voted into the actual sessions – so my proposed session was about something I did have a hell of a lot of exposure to. Learning. I have been a self-taught programmer since the age of 12 and have read countless books. One thing I knew I needed to do was to make one point clear throughout the entire session – the fact that what one person may find an easy way to learn, an easy way to progress can be completely different for someone else. There’s no solid answer to the question “What’s the best way to learn?”.

The only thing we can do when faced with such a question is explore the different ways of learning, and attempt to figure out the most efficient and the one that suits each person – we’re all different (which seems to have it’s upsides and its downsides respectively).

Unfortunately my session was not chosen for DDD8. This hasn’t put me off of the idea as I know a few people must have liked it as I got some positive feedback from those who are attending. I’ll still be getting the session material together and putting it in for as much publicity as possible. I believe that talking at a conference like this has the potential to make a name for yourself.

DDD8 is being held in Reading on Jan 30th – this Saturday.

As for the choice of sessions I’ll be attending, I think I’ve narrowed it down to Real World MVC Architectures by Ian Cooper, Commercial Software Development by Liam Westley, C# 4 by Jon Skeet (unmissable), Not everything is an object by Gary Short, and A Developer’s guide to Encryption by Barry ‘the irish lanky git’ Dorrans.

I have to say I’m wholly looking forward to a Saturday full of geekiness. Followed by Pizza.