Alt.Net Houston Open Spaces 2010
Ben Scheirman is organizing a conference for the Alt.Net community in Houston and I have heard great things about it in the past so I am planning to attend this year.
The conference is organized in the Open Spaces format. For those who have not attended a conference like this before, the idea is simple. None of the sessions (or very few) are officially scheduled in advance. Generally the first day, in this case Friday evening, the group gets together and plans the schedule based on ideas generated from the group and those who volunteer to speak/lead a session. The sessions are generally very good and highly interactive.
The cost is $20 but that includes pre-conference sessions on Friday April 30, a full day of sessions on Saturday, and a few sessions on Sunday with breakfast and coffee included. Check out the conference website to register and hopefully I will see you there.
Slides and Code from the iPhone DevCamp Core Data Presentation
I’m quite tardy in posting this so I apologize. Here is the code and slides from the presentation I did on Core Data at the Houston iPhone DevCamp on Jan 30. Thanks to everyone that attended.
Houston iPhone DevCamp
The Houston iPhone DevCamp is going to be held the weekend of January 30-31 in the space next door to CoffeeGroundz. There will be a total of 12 talks during the day Saturday with a happy hour at the end of the day to celebrate the 1st year of the Houston iPhone Developer Meetup.
Starting Saturday evening and going through the night until mid-Sunday morning, there is an iPhone App Jam scheduled. The idea is to develop a complete iPhone app overnight and present what you have developed the next morning. I will be participating and I know of several others that plan on it as well. Don’t be discouraged if you are a newbie to iPhone development as several of the talks will be introductory to help you get started (there will also be advanced talks for those who have been at it a while).
I’ll be giving an introductory talk on Core Data but there will always be two talks going at the same time so you have the opportunity to not have to listen to me if that doesn’t sound attractive. You can sign up on the DevCamp site so I hope to see you there!
Speaking at the Houston iPhone Developer’s Meetup Dec. 15
It has been quite a while since I’ve posted on my blog (too long). I was out of town on business for several weeks during the late Spring and over the Summer so making time for the blog was difficult.
I wanted to let anyone who might be interested know that I will be speaking at the Houston iPhone Developer’s Meetup on December 15. The topic will be Core Data (obviously on the iPhone OS). The talk will be an introduction covering configuration of the store, querying, updating, migration, and the iPhone specific functionality not available on the desktop OS.
Hope to see you there.
Heading to TechEd
I’ll be heading to TechEd North America this weekend. This year it is in Los Angeles.
It has been quite a while since I’ve been there so I’m really looking forward to it. Hopefully the flu scare and the economy (and associated budget cuts) won’t cut down attendance too drastically.
Houston ALT.NET Coding Dojo on TDD – May 7, 2009
J.P. Hamilton has organized a Coding Dojo that will cover TDD. It will be held at the Microsoft offices in Houston at 6pm on May 7th. Space is limited to 40 participants so sign up early if you want to attend.
Houston ALT.NET Conference coming in April
Ben Scheirman has announced that he is putting together a Houston ALT.NET Conference and it will be held at the Microsoft Offices the weekend of April 3-5, 2009. It will follow the Open Spaces format and it should be good based on my prior history with these sorts of events.
The event will be free to all attendees so plan on coming if you can make it. Unfortunately, I will probably end up missing the event since I will be taking a trip to Redmond and flying out that Sunday.
I Finally Joined Twitter
After spending time listening to the Virtual ALT.NET Meeting last night, I decided that I needed to go ahead and join Twitter because I was clearly missing out on some interesting community discussion.
James Avery had already told me that he found it a great resource, but sometimes I guess I need to hear it from more than one place.
The tipping point for me was the discussion around the VB.NET development community and open source. There was a great discussion of issues at the VAN and it was kicked off because of the lively discussion that had occurred on Twitter a few hours earlier.
I wished I could have participated a little in the discussion but I’ve had a major cold over the last few days and I was a little drugged up on cold medication. I ended up leaving the meeting after an hour so I could retire for the night so I missed the last part. Some of the great discussion:
- VB.NET community involvement in open source
- Difficulties encountered when introducing new concepts like IoC and ORM to .NET developers that have not been exposed before.
- Mass Transit
- migratordotnet and the newer Fluent Migrator that is being worked on
I’ll definitely be attending the future VAN meetings and hope to participate.
You can find me on Twitter – darrenstokes.
Houston TechFest Coming 1/24/09
The Houston .NET User Group is putting on the second Houston TechFest on January 24 at the University of Houston. The conference was originally scheduled for the Saturday that Hurricane Ike hit the Houston and Galveston area so this is rescheduled date.
Here are several tracks to choose from concentrating on both java and .NET.
I was out of town for the first TechFest but everyone who attended said it was well worth it.
Virtual ALT.NET Meeting and Houston Geek Dinner Tonight (1/7/09)
Chad Myers announced that there is VAN (Virtual ALT.NET Meeting) tonight. It is hosted on Live Meeting.
I’ve been wanting to attend one of the Houston Geek Dinners for the Houston ALT.NET group but I keep missing them. The next geek dinner is tonight and, unfortunately, I am going to miss this one as well. However the VAN is later in the evening so I’ll be checking that out.