25. August 2017
ZeroKoll
Personal
As of this Monday, I’m officially working as a ninja at tretton37 in Stockholm. And for those of you who don’t speak Swedish, tretton37 means thirteen37, which is just an awesome name for an IT company.
So what is a ninja? Well, it is pretty much just an IT consultant as such, but the company doesn’t like the idea of that word. At least in Sweden, it has basically been reduced to be the same as a hired resource. The word consultant isn’t about consulting, giving advice and offering knowledge anymore. So to mitigate that, the common name for a person that works at tretton37 is “ninja”. The focus is to give our clients more than just a resource that can code. It’s about more than that. It’s about giving tips and ideas, and go beyond just building something, and instead take a bigger responsibility for the solution. Making sure that we do our best to give the client what they need and not just what they ask for. It’s about listening to what they want to accomplish, and not what they want us to build.
This view of what we should be doing correlates well with my own view on what we should be doing. So I’m very excited to be here, and hopefully there are some cool projects for me here in the future. With some happy clients at the end…
While I wait for that though…I’ll take this chance to catch up on some blogging and things, with the goal being that my blog will once again be a living thing that actually provides value.
Once again, I was lucky enough to get a spot as a speaker at TechEd USA. This year, I am speaking about the SOLID principles, and about ASP.NET Web API. So far, I have managed to get one talk under my belt, and I personally think it went well!
An interesting, and kind of sucky part about TechEd this year is the fact that it has been sold out, and put in a location where there is not enough even enough room for everyone to attend the keynote sessions. Speakers were asked to not attend it, but instead watch it in one of the “overflow rooms”. Unfortunately, even these seemed to overflow. So I watched the keynote on a big screen TV in the exhibition area.
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After Steve Ballmer, Julie Larson-Green took the stage. And I know that it might not be politically correct to say it, but I love that it is a woman stepping on stage doing it. It is good for the industry, and everyone agrees with that, but pointing it out is apparently a problem to some. And the fact that she does it with a confidence that just outshines most of the people doing the TechEd keynotes is just awesome.
Unfortunately, I think she was dealt a somewhat bad hand. The stuff that she was showing off was cool, but very far from game changers unfortunately…
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[Updated: Now with proper spelling…]
I do not get to go to Build this year as I am min Madrid speaking at TechEd Europe, which to be honest, feels pretty great. No, we didn’t get two tablets and a presentation by Steve Ballmer, but TechEd has been at the top of my list of places I wanted to speak at for quite some time. So I’m ok with that…
Instead, I downloaded the keynote from day one, and thought I would reflect a bit on what was said. Starting out with Steve Ballmer’s part
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Ok, so I have just been at my first TechEd keynote on the nothern hemisphere and probably my 50th keynote all in all…and to be honest, it doesn’t get that much better… And by that, I don’t mean that keynotes don’t get better than the one I just saw. I mean that they don’t get better with time… 
In this case, it was pretty uneventful. A lot of IT-Pro stuff, which is to be expected at TechEd, but also a bit of Dev-Div stuff from Scott Gu. So even if most of it was out of my interest zone, there were a few cool things. Such as the announcement of pricing changes on Azure, as well as changes in licensing for using MSDN licenses in Azure for dev/test.
The biggest announcement being that shut down instances in Azure will not be charged in the future, and charging will be done per minute instead of per hour. So this makes for a great dev/test platform that won’t rack up too much cost as one can shut down instances when not in use, without having to delete them and thus cause long startup times…
Ok, that was about all I could get out of the keynote… Sorry if it wasn’t a lot, but at least it was something…
Next up on my personal schedule is to run off to the Microsoft Solution Experience stand and answer questions about Windows 8 development…
Yesterday I saw a few blog posts coming online, talking about the future of Microsoft’s development sphere. There was one from Scott at OdeToCode that talked about the future of .NET, and that open source might be the the thing that “saves” it. And then there was another one called “The Dying Platform: .NET”. I decided to highlight the later one on Twitter and Facebook, and got a few different replies. All of them more or less solidifying my beliefs, so I decided to write this post about it… And by that, I mean that people with a close connection with Microsoft and/or long experience of the Microsoft spehere, said it was wrong, and the more “regular Joe” developers said that it was spot on…
First of all, due to the fact that a couple of people fairly close to me told me that it was wrong, I will start off by explaining what parts of that second blog post I agree with, and why.
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Last week, I had the honor of having been invited to present my thoughts on testing at a IT consultant agency here in Stockholm. And even if I looked forward to it, and felt privileged to be allowed to share my view with these other devs, I still felt a bit hesitant. I was still going to step in front of a bunch of devs and present a somewhat less glorifying view on testing than you normally get. Not that I am all against testing, definitely not, but I do have a somewhat looser view on what, when and how to test software than say for example you regular TDD guy…
Walking in to the presentation, I had material for about an hour of presenting, and hoped to maybe extend it to an hour and a half with discussions and debate (I did hope for a lot of discussion as it was really the goal of my presentation). However, it turned out that after an hour and a half, we had a break for food, and then I kept going a bit more. I think we ended the session after almost 3 hours, even though I think it could probably been longer if I had pushed my points a bit more to the extreme than I did.
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19. April 2012
ZeroKoll
Personal
I think it is time for another rant. Actually I really don’t, as my blog is supposed to be about coding, not about me ranting… It seems like my blog has slowly gone from code centric posts, to ramblings of a grumpy Microsoft developer. Sorry about that, and I promise to focus more on code in the future…
Lately I have travelled around and talked at a bunch of conferences, and heard a lot of really smart people talk about a lot of really cool things. This got me thinking a bit about my own way of dealing with new technology, as well as about my own way of doing things today… The result of this thinking is that I am going to try and make 2 changes. First, I am going to try and get out and about and try more new stuff. More frameworks, technologies and maybe even more languages… Hopefully this will fuel my blog with more code related posts as well as interesting revelations and thoughts. Secondly, I might have revisit my stance on unit testing and TDD…
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At my MVVM session at DevConnections, I promised to put the code on my blog for people to have a look at. So here it is!
Download: DevConnections.MVVM.zip (36.64 kb)
30. March 2012
ZeroKoll
Personal
So, here I am sitting at the speakers lounge at DevConnections at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas after another great conference. It is amazing the level American conferences keep. The speakers are great, the conferences are well organized and everything just flows. And it is pretty cool to be able to share the speakers lounge with people like John Papa, Dan Wahlin, Paul Litvin, Juval Löwy and Scott Hanselman. It is also very humbling. These presenters are really the cream of the crop, and I am still kind of wondering what I did here. But I got to do it, and had a lot of fun, so I won’t complain.
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