Got a project and can’t decide on a typeface? This chart is by no means complete, but it might help steer you in the right direction. Click it to see it at full size.
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The 5th annual Toronto Code Camp takes place next Saturday, May 1st, in the SEQ building on Seneca College’s York Campus (Seneca@York). If you’re a developer who builds or is thinking of building on the .NET platform, you want to catch this free event!
Last year’s event had over 350 attendees who caught 25 sessions, including the infamous “Data Bondage with Silverlight”, which opened with the equally infamous “assless chaps and accordion performance”. I make no guarantees this year, other than that I’ll be there and that this year’s event will be the biggest and best one yet, with a whopping 40 sessions arranged into 8 tracks.
Code Camp happens because of Chris Dufour, .NET community guy extraordinare, who’s been making it happen for the past few years. It’s a free-as-in-beer event, a labour of love carried out by Chris and a team of dedicated volunteers and funded by generous sponsors including The Empire.
Here’s a run-down of Toronto Code Camp 2010’s agenda:
I’ll be present at the event, making myself useful as an official Microsoft representative and as a Windows Phone 7 Champ and Azure go-to guy.
Toronto Code Camp takes place in the SEQ building at Seneca’s campus at York University, which is at 70 The Pond Road. Click the map below to see a Bing map and get directions:
See you there!
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Kate Beaton’s Scenes from “The Great Gatsby”
Halifax-based Kate Beaton draws funny historical comics at her site, Hark, a Vagrant! In her latest comic, she pokes fun at one of my all-time favourite novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
When I was young, I used to cringe when adults made clumsy, if well-intentioned, attempts to speak in what they thought was “youthful slang” in order to make a connection with us.
Now that I’m one of those adults, I can’t tell for sure whether the message in this poster (which I saw in the Toronto subway yesterday) comes across to today’s net/text-speaking youth as clever or clumsy. I’m torn – should my reaction be LOL or WTF?
(And is it me, or does the expression on the guy’s face say BRB?)
I know I should be recoiling in horror at this sight, but as a fan of biscuits and gravy, I’m curious to see how close (or far) the convenience store version is from the real, down-home thing. And is there a sweeter phrase than “sausage gravy dispenser”?
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The Recipe for “Happy”
Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while know that hedonics – the study of what makes us happy or unhappy – is a pet topic of mine. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I like the graphic below:
Yes, the “Change something” part of the flowchart covers a ridiculously large amount of ground – the “something” could be “your world”, “yourself”, “how you see things” or a mix of the three — and up to several years of work, personal journeying and possibly therapy, but the procedure outlined in the poster is the basic recipe for “happy”.
Here are links to the people and/or entities that appear in the credits at the bottom of the poster:
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EnergizeIT Academic Visits
Ah, student life. While waiting to do a presentation at Fanshawe College in London, I had a quick student lunch, pictured below:
Damir and I have been touring all over the country over the past couple of weeks for EnergizeIT. Two weeks ago, we were in Kelowna and Victoria, last week we were in London and Kitchener/Waterloo and this week, we’ll be in Fredericton and Moncton. We’re “Team Rover”, one of three teams visiting 20 cities, large and small, across Canada, with John Bristowe and Rodney Buike making up “Team West” and Christian Beauclair and Rick Claus comprising “Team East”.
EnergizeIT’s main presentations are about what’s possible with the Microsoft platform, with a focus on those parts that lots of people use to help them get work done and make their businesses go: Visual Studio 2010, Azure, SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. In those presentations, we’re demoing these tools and technologies in action with live code and live data, and yes, we’re promoting Microsoft stuff.
In addition to the main presentations, we’ve been doing academic visits, which are quite different. They’re about helping students make the transition from school to the working world. In these presentations, I make very little mention of Microsoft, leaving it just to:
- Hey, I work for Microsoft!
- A quick story about how I landed my job at Microsoft
- At the very end, I point them to a couple of sites:
- DreamSpark, where Microsoft offers a lot of free developer software to students
- Imagine Cup, Microsoft’s international student programming competition
- Our blogs, Canadian Developer Connection and IT Pro Connection
The academic presentation focuses on the sorts of things that one should do to have a career in technology that’s rewarding in every sense of the word. The core message is that you, the student about to enter the working world, are in charge of your own future, and that in this industry and time, there’s a lot you can do to shape it.
Each of the teams has been working from a presentation created by Qixing Zheng, who used to be with the Microsoft Canada Developer Evangelism team and has since gone on to join the Windows User Experience group, but we’ve been pretty free to add our own twists to it. Our team’s version features a lot of interesting stuff, including:
- The story of my first client meeting, which was a disaster
- The importance of an online presence of some sort
- How to get experience when you’re not yet in the working world
- The value of “soft skills”
- Why operating on just your “left brain” isn’t going cut it anymore
- Ideas from a number of books, including:
- The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler
- The Tipping Point and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
- Negotiating for Dummies by Michael and Mimi Donaldson
- Celebrating Failure by Ralph Heath
So far, Damir and I have done presentations at:
- Camosun College in Victoria
- Douglas College in Vancouver
- Fanshawe College in London
- Conestoga College in Waterloo
and we’re going to present next week here in Toronto at:
I’d love to do these visits to universities as well as colleges, but the EnergizeIT tour takes place just as universities are going into final exams. I hope that TechDays, which happens from September through December (fall semester in universities) gives us a chance to present at universities across Canada, including my beloved alma mater, Queen’s.
I enjoy doing presentations of all sorts, but I have to admit that there’s a special place in my heart for presenting to students. It’s partly because students are a fun crowd to present to, and partly because there’s the notion of me – of all people, given my checkered academic history – standing at a college or university lectern, presenting ideas to students is rather funny. I love doing the academic visits, and I still have trouble believing that I’m getting paid to do something that’s this much fun.