A Year in Review: 2018
I cannot believe that 2018 has come and gone, it is crazy how quickly time moves when you’re busy doing things you love and spending time with loved ones. I’m so grateful for all the amazing experiences that I get to share with you all.
Community Ventures 🤘
The year started off with speaking at South Florida Code Camp, and it is hard to believe how many developers they have attend their code camp — it’s incredible. If you have a chance to visit Florida in February, I highly suggest attending (or speaking at) this event. February continued with another speaking engagement, this one was more local though. MilwaukeeJS asked me to represent Angular on a Front-end Framework Panel which proved to be thoroughly entertaining to say the least. I took a break in March because I flew out to my first ever Microsoft MVP Summit… that and I knew that April was going to be a busy month too.
I was invited to speak internationally for my first time. IT-Konekt is developer conference in Serbia, they had reached out to Maria Naggaga asking for someone to speak on C#. Maria suggested that they reach out to me — sometimes the stars align and wonderful things happen. Hold those moments close to your heart — it was truly a Journey of a Lifetime. I delivered my “What’s new in C#” talk three times in three different cities in Serbia over the course of a week. We traveled from Belgrade to Niš and then onto Novi Sad, I was so humbled and honored to be a part of it. As part of my travels I appeared on the National news — which was pretty spectacular!
In May I was asked to speak at the Johnson Controls International Tech Challenge. I was one of the first ever non-employees asked to speak, it was an amazing feeling. I delivered my “Upgrade Yourself” talk, which has been really well received — I’m looking forward to evolving this talk into a keynote as I believe it is truly inspirational. It shares my personal story!
We enter June, where I was invited to speak at SyntaxCon in South Carolina. This conference was educational as I picked up many lessons from Scott Hanselman and the organizers who shared various insights and ideas for bettering a developer conference experience. Later in June I delivered another talk at MilwaukeeJS, this time on TypeScript.
July was great — first because it’s the month of my birth, but also because I got to spend the day with a good friend of mine who just so happens to be the Director of .NET Curriculum for a small company called Pluralsight — maybe you’ve heard of them?! Later that evening I spoke at the Chicago .NET User Group on C#.
Into August is when I enjoyed my first time speaking at THAT Conference. I’ve been attending the conference for a long time, it is one of the few truly family friendly conferences — so I usually try to make it happen. Clark put together a series of webcasts deemed “AskTHAT” where he brings on various people from the community. I did an episode with him on “Work life balance, Community and a few Travel Hacks”… it was lot of fun. Oh yeah, I almost forgot…my talk at THAT conference was “WebAssembly: The New Endgame”.
In September I traveled to Detroit to speak at QL Tech Con. This internal conference to the employees of Quicken Loans was extremely impressive and they had numbers to boast. I delivered a talk on WebAssembly and was met with much enthusiasm from the attendees!
October was a crazy-busy month for me as I spent time traveling to Saint Louis for my second year in a row speaking at DevUp. This is a large developer conference that is eager to hear my talk about languages — I again gave variants of TypeScript and C# talks. When I returned back, I had to pivot my focus on Cream City Code — as this conference was only a few days after DevUp. I am so proud of the amazing conference that the team puts together, year after year… I’m truly so grateful to be a part of it.
There is a really clever thing happening in Milwaukee, it’s called Meet the Meetups… it is basically a meetup where all the other meetup organizers go to share updates with the community. The first occurrence of this had over 500 people show up (800 total registrations), yeah an insanely large meetup. Anyways, the second edition featured lightning talks and mine was one of them — Upgrade Yourself: A Guide To #Developer Community Success.
In November I spoke at Milwaukee Code Camp on TypeScript. Then later in the month I did the local .NET User Group and spoke about WebAssembly. I also experimented with a video series called “DMP in 3” — where the objective was to cover a topic in three minutes, this proved to be very trying!
Also in November, I was referred into the GDE (Google Developer Expert) program by my good friend and peer Chris DeMars. Being referred is the only way into the program, but you must pass several interviews. I was first asked to fill out a bunch of paper work, documenting all of the activities that I’ve done for the previous 12 months — not unlike the Microsoft MVP program. I then had a “community interview” with a current standing GDE, this is to assess my stance on Developer Community and to ensure that it is aligned with Google’s. Following this interview and assuming you get the proverbial nod of approval Google will schedule a “product team” interview. This is the more technical portion of the interview.
In December I was attempting to lay low…for the first time ever my wife and I packed up our three sons (Lyric 6 year old, Londyn 4 year old and Lennyx 2 year old) and traveled to Disney World. It was so much fun experiencing that with my family for the first time — we grew so much from it. I was in San Francisco for a few days and spoke at a VueJs meetup… and I ended my speaking this year with a final talk at NEWDUG speaking about TypeScript.
Podcasts / Webcasts 🎤
I love talking about technology and sharing thoughts on the future of software. I made several noteworthy podcast appearances this year.
Blogs 📝
I wrote a fair amount of blogs this year also, I hope that you’ve run across them in the wild — or that they’ve been able to help you in some way. If they have, please share them with the hope that they might help others.
- ASP.NET Core Configuration Tips
- ASP.NET Core Unit Testing For Security
- ASP.NET Core + Angular Photo Booth App
- Angular HTTP Tips For Success
- The Future Of .NET Core
- WebAssembly — Steve Sanderson Interview
- Writing A Blazor App — Blazing Chuck
- C# Favorite Features Through The Years
- C# All The Things — C# Advent Calendar Post
- TypeScript: A Tour Of Generics
- Upgrade Yourself: Becoming a Microsoft MVP
- Interviewing Hacks — ML-TL
- Welcome To Cream City Code
Until Next Year 🍻
Looking back through all of this is a bit insane, I hadn’t realized how much I’ve really done for the community until it’s been quantified like this 😱…I want everyone to know that my motivation behind all these efforts is purely to strengthen the developer community and help those in need. If you find yourself needing help don’t be afraid to reach out, if I can’t help you — I’ve built a deep network of peers who probably can — just ask. I hope this post finds you happy and healthy! Here’s to an even more successful 2019! Cheers!!
