Community Blogs

Today I'm going to tell you a little story about me. I think of myself as your typical description of a geek . Passionate about all things technological, eager to find out how the inner details work together, a movie and music lover, and spending too much time behind a computer. Having all those feats, over the course of twenty years , result in getting out of touch with the what interests the large part of the population. I don't care about soccer, drinking, going out or making a complete fool out of myself. I can talk for hours about some architecture however, or about techy pranks . But you know what? My surroundings don't have a clue what I'm talking about, usually ending up in me not bothering anymore. Same for taste of...

Dunno if it means anything to anyone, but I just got email stating that Joteke's Blog has scored 8.2 on Blogged.com. According to them " We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style. After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.2 score. " I was also got a score bad, which you can see on news section on right-side of the main page. And here's the dedicated page: http://www.blogged.com/blogs/jotekes-blog.html Personally this means a lot to me because I'm not native in English - I'm from Finland, EU if someone still doesn't know -, and I don't feel being experienced writer by no means. I just write...

I completely forgot as I did this in beta 3 months ago… that was a surprise this morning to get a notification that I earned the Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET Application Development competency (exam 70-562). Certifications are not important for anyone, but for me as an MCT I need to be certified to teach training, so this one is good for Visual Studio 2008 courses! The 70-562 exam should be available to public in august 2008. The preparation guide is already visible here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/70-562.mspx Read More...

Notches is hiring developers . We’re looking to bring on developers to be part of the core engineering team. We want people that can contribute to the product in a myriad of ways beyond coding. We want people who can ask the tough questions and challenge us. We want people who are not afraid to take ownership over an area and really drive it forward. Our core platform is written in C# / .NET, so familiarity there will help – but ultimately we’re looking for smart, ambitious people with a good background in computer science, algorithms, and so on. Our offices are currently in downtown New York City (SoHo). We’re certainly flexible in terms of hours but we do want to spend as much time as possible collaborating in person – in other words, we’re...

A few months ago I went to MIX08 , which was I must say an excellent conference with a very different focus from DevConnections, TechEd, and PDC. However, the weather was against me, and I've been meaning to write about it for some time. Now that I'm about to head to 95 degree Orlando, I think it's time. But the weather is really just the enabler for the real point, which is that customer service can create fans from customers, and fans will get you more customers than thousands of dollars of advertising. Getting to MIX We'll keep this brief since it's old news, but while trying to fly out of Cleveland on a Tuesday evening to arrive in Vegas that night, ice storms kept us from departing. We sat on the runway for over an hour...

I was talking to a couple of friends and occasional smokers today, and both were commenting about how nice it is that Seattle is almost entirely non-smoking now, so they didn't light up while in town for the MVP Summit. I've never smoked, but listening to them, clearly they were not addicts in the hard-core packs-a-day kind, but they would smoke socially or just to be doing something. So it occurred to me, especially given that the three of us had just spent half of lunch each individually checking various Twitter feeds (and email) on our phones, that perhaps Twitter and similar apps on mobile devices are having a positive health impact. Why light up a cigarrette when you can keep your hands busy with your phone checking Twitter, texting...

If you just read my blog for technical stuff, you can skip this one. So at the start of the year I set a few personal goals . Since the best way to achieve goals, I've found, is to break them down into smaller and smaller pieces (as in "The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step"), I thought I would assess my progress on the five goals I set for myself. Goal 1 - 200 Blog Posts in 2008. That breaks down nicely into 50 per quarter, and in the first quarter I published 52 posts, just barely on track. February was pretty light with only 9. I'm sure if it had had 30 days in it I could have written a lot more posts. Of course, if it had had only 28 days, I might not have had nearly as many... We'll call this one...

I thought I should post a follow-up since I'm sure many people ready my post on Tuesday about going to work for Microsoft on some code-named project and (a) didn't remember it was April Fool's Day and (b) didn't then read the comments where I pointed out that it was a joke. I'm still happily self-employed and working on Lake Quincy Media , ASPAlliance.com , and a new consulting business that so far is trying to focus on agile development and in particular setup of continuous integration for shops that don't already have it (just wrapping up one of these). I like being my own boss (or at least, having my wife as my boss - she's the CEO of Lake Quincy and runs the show there), but if I ever did go to work for somebody...

After many years of working with Microsoft technology as a developer, Regional Director , and MVP, I'm finally giving in and joining the team as an official blue badge wielding full time employee, starting today. This was simply an opportunity too good to pass up, to work on some very cool technology for which, while I can't talk about details just yet, I've been given the freedom to choose its codename. Ah, the responsibility! I could go with something from the past, but no, I think it would be better to solicit ideas from you, my readers! What name do you want associated with the next cool developer thingy, which inevitably will later be dubbed Microsoft Adjective Adjective Adjective {Year} Noun for Adjective Adjective Adjective...

Just a note for anyone still subscribing, I'm moving my blog to my own host. You can continue reading at http://blog.eworldui.net or if you'd like to update your feed, point it towards http://blog.eworldui.net/syndication.axd . I'm going to start blogging again, it's been too long! I've got some exciting news coming up that I can't wait to share, so stay tuned for my announcement! Read More...