Career.Next

When you start a new job, that first day is one of the most exciting you have while you’re there. You’re busy getting settled in, meeting new people, learning new ways of doing things, and eventually fitting in and finding your place. For me, that day was June 21st, 2004 and the new company was Quick Solutions Inc.

However, on that first day, you don’t start thinking about when the last day will be. But with most careers that last day on a job is out there somewhere. Eventually your career leads you on to something new, something more challenging, maybe something you never expected back on that first day. That’s exactly what has happened with me, and that last day at QSI that I never really expected will be January 8th, 2010.

To say I appreciate the opportunities granted me while I was at Quick would be a rather large understatement. I’m still in awe of some of the people I worked with over the years at QSI. Most everybody assembled in our app dev group was extremely talented and extremely passionate about technology, continuous improvement, and sharing what they knew. It was exciting to go to work most days because of who was going to be sitting at the desk next to you.

So what is next? I’m off to Reflex Design & Technology to help them build a development team. Actually, on day 1 I’ll BE the dev team - Lord help them. I’m more than a little excited to be stepping into this role with them. (Yes, if you’re doing the date math in your head, I’ll be at Reflex for two days then I head for Codemash.)

Again, many thanks to the folks I worked with at QSI. There’s no way I’d be ready to step into the role I’m taking without all that I’ve learned from all of you over the last five plus years.

I’m sure at this point many of you are asking, “Why did he leave?” That’s not easy to answer. It’s a very long and complex process I went through to arrive at this decision. But, I managed to sum it up in just two words…

Lotus Notes

Tech Night - Getting Started with MVC

First of all, thanks to all those who attended TechNight this past week at QSI HQ. That was by far the largest crowd I'd seen gather for TechNight, much bigger than the 10 people that came in September when I presented on ASP.Net AJAX. With Quick having the much larger training center now, I hope this trend continues.

The Snag

During post-presentation discussions, I finally arrived at why the test failed. Short version: I'm an idiot.

Long version: I went with the whole TDD approach to the presentation to show how MVC was more testable. It is a great way to show some of the advantages of MVC. It is if you continue to run those tests as you refactor your code.

What I did was stop at red, green, refactor. I didn't try for more green following an additional refactoring. I had written and passed my product controller tests, where the big test failure happened in the presentation, before I had added my model code to the product controller. That's a pretty big change, and clearly the tests caught that change...in front of an audience, rather than in the comfort of my own home.

So, my protests of, "These passed at home!" were correct, because I only ran them once. Like I said, idiocy.

In the end we got it working for purposes of the demo, and I owe Mel, Steve, Steve, Kris and many others who shouted advice a big thanks for helping me over the hurdle. However, the demo ended up testing what I didn't need or want to test: That LINQ was doing what it said. I had wanted to add one more test prior to the demo that hit an in memory collection of products, that would have solved my problem with the connection string and been a much better test of the controller code.

Here is a link to the code and slides: Getting Started With MVC

That resisdes in a SVN repository on Google Code (thanks Steve), and will get updated as I update the presentation. Clearly I have a couple of tests to add, some data issues to clear up, and will probalby change the slides some as it progresses. Keep an eye on it in the near future for updates, CODoDN will be here before I know it.

GROK Talk Slides

For all you who sat through my record timed performance of a GROK talk, here are the slides.


Pragmatic Programmer Sermon

I apologize for ripping through it, but the gift exchange loomed. The subject didn't really lend itself to Q&A real well, though I think all the points are important. If you haven't read/borrowed/stolen this book yet, do so today. For the time being, here's the list of tips from the book. I worked off about 20 of them.

Post GROK

A friend of mine recently purchased a restaurant in town. After the Quick festivities I headed there to discuss reworking his website. (I'm working for beer...it's a win, win.) This particular friend spent about 15 years in the local IT market, so he has some contacts.

While I was there a group of four guys strolled in to celebrate the end of the work week. Turns out these four guys were in IT, my buddy strikes up a conversation, since they were buying beer from him and all. They work for a small consulting firm (that I'd never heard of), and were very intrigued to find out that I was a developer. So, they asked the standard sales/recruiting questions...where are you, what do you do, etc. The requisite, "You don't sound so happy, here's my card, we'll pay you more," came out and I smiled politely.

Then they sent over one of their developers, at least they introduced him as such. He struck up a very non-technical discussion about the .Net Framework, PHP, MySQL, and some other buzzwords. I managed to not laugh uncontrollably, and continued to smile politely. Honestly, as soon as he attached "Framework" to .Net, I was done. I would have easily been the most senior person in their shop...probably by a few years. Then it hit me: Do I want to be the mostest seniorest person in a very junior body shop, or a senior member of the development environment I am currently a member of?

Without gushing too much...I'm not going anywhere. The IT talent collected around me at this point is amazing, and Quick keeps bringing it in. The whole, "We'll pay you more!" argument is intriguing, but how much more would it take? I'm in a pretty good position at this point. The advancement within the group is no easy task, but the advancement professionally is as good as it gets.