Public Speaking, Oh My!

I've been asked by the local LANUG (Lower Alabama .NET User Group) to speak at the next meeting, in September. I've talked it over with Ryan, the organizer, and we decided that the best topic I could present on would be the Social Networking for Developers address that Scott Hanselman gave at Devscovery. I hope he won't be upset. In fact, I need to email him and clear it with him, maybe ask for some help or pointers.

Lets see... what are the topics to cover...
1. Blogging for Devs (Why you should do it and Who you should be reading)
2. Social Networking (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)
3. Community Code Sites (Stack Overflow, Sourceforge)
4. Team Utilities (gist.github.com, pastie.org, etherpad.com)

I should probably go over appropriate vs. inappropriate social activities while on the job and what you should or shouldn't put on a public blog, if I have time. I have to fill an hour's worth of content. I have 3 weeks to prepare for the lecture.

I'm looking forward to it, now I just have to find the time to get my presentation all squared away before then, without falling behind in school or work. Goody!

Rich

Dev Journal: The First Post!

So, this is my developer journal blog. I'm writing this after being inspired to dive deeper into the social networking sphere at the Devscovery conference in Redmond Washington, a couple weeks ago. Scott Hanselman gave the keynote about Social Networks for Developers. He made the case that Developers have come to rely on Social Networking for most of our developer questions. Think about it... when you need to look up the syntax or figure out how to solve a novel problem, what do you do? Do you walk over to your stash of tech books and thumb through the pages, trying to find what you want? No! You Google it (with Bing, if you're Scott)! When you Google your problem, 9 times out of 10, you'll find a post on a forum, a blog post, an article on a developer network, or some other related form of content that was put out on the web by another developer who had to solve the same problem you're now looking in to.

Scott made the case to all of us that keeping a developer blog is valuable to the community, and valuable to yourself. I don't know about any of you, but I have lost count of the number of times I have solved a problem and moved on with my work, only to run into the same or similar problem 6 months later, and don't have a clue how I solved it last time. So, I'm going to be using this blog discuss and archive these developer problems and solutions. When I find something that I think is worth saving, or solve a difficult problem, I will archive the info here.

I'm not a public figure, I'm not a ground breaking developer, I'm just a .NET junkie trying to make my way as a Software Engineer. This journal is more for my benefit than yours, but if you happen to stumble upon this blog and find something that saves your bacon on whatever project you're working on, be my guest. I'm not looking for comments or feedback, but if you have something to contribute to a thread, again... be my guest.

Anyway, that's all I have to say. If you find something that helps you, awesome. If not, back to Google with you!

Richard Akers