If there’s one impression that Austin left on me, besides the one that Rudy’s “extra moist” barbecue left on my gut, is that it’s a developer friendly town. This past week I spent three days in Austin meeting with all sorts of developers and had many great conversations about technology. I met with companies and people with a passion for technology that couldn’t be suppressed. Meeting with Dell The reason I was in town was to give a couple of presentations at a mini-conference for Dell employees. On my first day in Austin, the day before the conference, I met with a team working on the next generation of Dell.com . The site is undergoing a large scale rearchitecture based heavily on ASP.NET MVC 2. I fielded some questions on ASP.NET MVC and...(read more)
The stars at night, are big and bright – clap clap clap clap – deep in the heart of Texas ! Hold onto your ten gallon hats, I’m visiting Texas for the first time! I’m very excited to visit the second largest state in the union. ;) The purpose of my trip is to meet with some developers at Dell doing interesting things and to give a talk there as well. But since I’ve heard such good things about the vibrant tech community in Austin, I am trying to make the most of my short trip. On Thursday, February 25, I’ll be speaking at Austin .NET User Group meeting at 5:30 PM CST ( Location TBD, I’ll post it here when I find out or follow @ehexter on Twitter ) . So be sure to come by and say hello. I’m also going to visit my good friends at Headspring as...(read more)
One question that came up recently during my mid-year review is how am I measuring customer satisfaction with the products that I work on? For example, how can I measurably demonstrate that customers are happy with the work we are doing on ASP.NET MVC and that my team is responding to customer feedback? Umm, I can’t? At least not right now in a measurable manner. I don’t have any such metric and I’m not sure how reliable any metric I might come up with will be. But perhaps that’s simply due to a lack of imagination on my part. In the past, we’ve tried various unscientific online twitter polls. One thing we did was ask the world for a list of ASP.NET pain points and compile them into one big list. Then at the end of the product cycle, we could...(read more)
Just wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or a Happy whatever you are celebrating at this time of year. I hope you are spending it well with family and friends! :) As you can see, I’m still hard at work watching the kids on paternity leave. My brother is a drug dealer and the name of the drug is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the X-Box 360. I’m totally hooked right now, and I don’t usually get so hooked on games. At least I am managing to still get some fresh air outside and enjoy the weather. Here I’m walking with my wife (taking the photo), my mother, my son, and my brother. Of course, every walk we go on ends up with me lugging my son around. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. :) Technorati Tags: christmas , holidays...(read more)
Ok, it wasn’t necessarily my ass that was saved, but it was years worth of images which were important to me! As I wrote yesterday , my blog’s hosting server had a hard-drive failure effectively wiping out my virtual machine, taking my blog down with it. Fortunately, I was able to get back up with a static archive of my site provided by Rich Skrenta, but I was missing all my images and other content (code samples). As Jeff mentions, I have learned the hard way that there are almost no organizations spidering and storing images on the web. Keep in mind that the images are not just mere eye candy. In many cases, they serve to illustrate key concepts: “ As you can see in the screenshot above, if the screenshot were still to exist, but through the...(read more)
March 1, 2010