They're showing off some tools that remind me a lot of Expression. I've got to go to the Flex Vs. Silverlight event next month.

So the main event is about to start. I was pretty impressed by the FlexBuilder 3 IDE. They gave me a copy of version 2, so I'll have to give that a go.

I was interviewed earlier this week for IBM's developerWorks podcast. I haven't listened to it yet, but here it is:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int072407.html

So I've recovered from MashupCamp. I came in without a lot of knowledge about mashups. I'd done some screen scraping and aggregating different web sites, but it was always brute force, no API usage or anything. Between Mashup U and MashupCamp, I learned a lot about the whole scene. I met some people from Dapper, uLocate, IBM, and Bungee Labs that had some tools that I hadn't seen before. Mashups will definitely be a topic early next semester.

I'm at my friend's house in SF, getting ready to head to Mashup U.

I've set up a calendar and a map with the events in the area. The points on the map have links to the calendar items in them, so if you find an event you want to attend, you can automatically add it to your Google calendar. I'm working on making the whole map thing automatic, mashup style, but until then, I'll just have to update these things manually.

Calendar and Map

A big part of the reason I left work and returned to school was that reached a point where I wasn't learning as much as I wanted to be. My environment had turned to one where I was working more or less in isolation, so any new advances I made were done on my own time, and any time I encountered a problem I couldn't figure out, I would have to scour message boards, hoping someone had had a similar problem that I could adapt the solution from.

Initially, I was hired to do some refactoring and maintain the parts of the software that the two other guys couldn't get to without straying from the major fixes and updates the software needed. I really enjoyed the environment these guys had created, and was learning a lot about object oriented development, source control, bug tracking, server tools, and working on a team. We got some good practices set in place, moved from sending out whatever build we had around to a latest release version, and really stabilized the product. Unfortunately, this came a little late, and one of the other developers had burned out and decided to leave. About that time, I had really come into my own as a developer, and so I took over his project, and soon had it working faster and better than ever.

The ultimate goal when I was hired was to rewrite the software that I had now inherited. We had gone through the planning stage a few times before the third guy had left, but always got pulled off to do some modifications to our existing projects before we could really get anywhere. I never got to do that project, but the planning phases introduced me to .NET, which I used when I got the chance to write an application from the ground up. I really grew to like the tools I was using for this project. The application was written in C# with a SQL Server 2005 Express server running in the background for the data.

I had participated to the best of my ability in the community around .NET, including attending what developer events my company would allow. After attending some great events, especially the MSDN Events and Code Camp up in Portland, I began to wonder if I could do something like that. I'd always enjoyed giving presentations and working with people, and it would give me a chance to stay current with the new technology coming out.

After returning to school, I got the chance to work with a lot of the students and faculty, and found that there was almost no Microsoft culture on campus. One of the students I met up with heard that I had worked with Microsoft, and recommended that I apply for the Microsoft Student Ambassador program, now called the Microsoft Student Partner program, on campus. Unfortunately, I was a bit too late for that year's application, but I was told to apply again towards the end of the school year. In the meantime, I worked for a short time doing some development with ASP.NET on campus, and worked towards identifying ways that I could help bring some .NET loving to campus.

At the end of the last semester, spurred on by a conversation I had with Anand Iyer at an event down in San Francisco, I gave a presentation as part of the series of talks put on by UPE, the computer science honors society, on what .NET is, and what you can do with it. It was an overview of the different tools available, the Express versions of the studio, XNA, the Micro Framework, Compact Framework, Mono, that kind of thing. The primary reason I gave the talk was to spread the word and gauge the interest on the idea of starting a Dot Net User Group in Chico. Around this time, I became the events coordinator for UPE, and had sent in my application for the Student Partner program. I had some big plans for the upcoming school year, and I knew that with these positions, they would be within reach.

Well, after all that, the ultimate reason for this post is that yesterday, I got an email saying that I had been accepted into the program. The only thing left is to submit proof of eligibility for employment, and I should be good to go. Now I've got to make up the site for the Dot Net User Group, contact a few of the presenters who said they would be interested in coming up to talk, get the working group for developer certification up and going, and create enough content for the UPE talks.