So I was at Prairie Dev Con last week, giving a few talks. David Wesst was right before my Win 8 with HTML/JS talk and totally nailed his HTML5 talk. It was entertaining, had flashy demos, and really got the point across. After that he came to me and we started talking about “live coding” in presentations.

I had a Raspberry Pi sitting around my house, as I’m sure many do, and I thought to myself “Boy I sure could use a $100 desk clock!” So I went on ebay and bought a 7” touchscreen LCD that accepts HDMI input, setup AdaFruit’s WebIDE on my raspberry pi, and started hacking. Here’s the result so far…

I’ll be presenting at Prairie Dev Con 2013 in Winnipeg tomorrow, and since there’s so many good talks this year I want to give people a bit more information on my two talks to help those decide if they’d like to attend (or not).

New idea of the week! How about a Visual Studio add-in that lets you listen to online playlists that consist of your favorite songs as well as songs that other developers are currently listening to?

For me, one of the most important aspects of the agile movement has been self-management. Moving from a “here, work on this” management model to a “let’s work as a team” has made huge strides in productivity for development groups around the world. One of the key tenants of this has been ownership.

There’s a common misconception from a management/executive standpoint that throwing more staff at a project or problem may increase the progress or throughput. Of course, most developers and other knowledge workers know this is definitely not the case, but it’s pretty hard to describe why - it just doesn’t work that way. I’m going to take a stab at explaining it in terms that everyone can relate to.

Just finished reading The Programmers Before Us Were Better, where the author proposes that because of a lower barrier to entry into software development is corrupting the industry as a whole. I left that article with a feeling of “yes, but…” - I’m going to attempt to clarify my thoughts on this post.

Analytics are great. They help measure and compare information. Sometimes that information is important, sometimes it’s superfluous, but the important thing is you’re capturing it. The thing that gets me is the part afterwards - what do you do with those numbers, with those comparisons, with all that data after you’ve captured it?

I read an article last week, Don’t worry that your job is pointless, that tries to assure developers that although we’re not out saving babies or changing the world, that’s okay. We’ll get plenty of other opportunities to change people’s lives outside of our career - focus on those. Based on a few personal ancedotes I find myself disagreeing with this viewpoint - as developers, we make a lot of difference in the world whether we know it or not.

I’ve only recently “broke out” into the tech speaker scene, starting mid-last year with a talk I did at MoSo Conf’s HTML5 Code Camp. Since then I’ve had some pretty good success getting gigs at local events like Regina Tech Community and Prairie Dev Con, but would really like to branch out from there. I’m finding it pretty hard - the conferences I’d be interested in are either invite only or I hear about them way too late. It kind of reminds me when I was first looking for a job out of school.