Someone recently emailed me to ask if I’m speaking at any upcoming conferences this year. Good question! I’ve been keeping it pretty light this year since my family and I are doing a bit of travelling ourselves and I like spending time with them. But I will be hitting up two conferences that I know of. <anglebrackets/> April 8 – 11 Ohmagerd! That’s this week! I better prepare! I’ll be giving two talks this week. One of them will be a joint talk with the incomparable Scott Hanselman. Usually that means him taking potshots at...
I have a confession to make. I sometimes avoid your feedback on the Twitters. It’s nothing personal. I have a saved search for stuff I work on because I want to know what folks have to say. I want to know what problems they might run into or what ideas they have to improve things. Nonetheless, I sometimes just let the unread notifications sit there while I hesitate and cringe at the thought of the vitriol that might be contained within. I know. I know. That’s terrible. It’s long been conventional wisdom that if you’re going to write...
In my last post, I talked about the MonkeySpace conference conference and how it reflects positive trends in the future of open source in .NET. But getting to a better future is going to take some work on our part. And a key component of that is making NuGet better. Several discussions at MonkeySpace made it clear to me that there is some pervasive confusion and misconceptions about NuGet. It also made it clear that there are some dramatic changes needed for NuGet to continue to grow into a great open source project. In this post, I’ll cover some...
At the end of last year, I wrote a blurb about the Open Source Fest event at Mix 2011. Imagine the typical exhibition hall, but filled with around 50 open source projects. Each project had a station in a large room where project members presented what they were working on to others. You could see the gleam of inspiration in the smiles of developers as they exchanged ideas and suggestions. I left this event completely fired up. This is the spirit we tried to capture with the MonkeySpace conference this year. And at least for me, it succeeded. I’m...
Next week my wife and I celebrate our tenth anniversary in Oahu with the kids. It’s been a great ten years and I’m just so lucky to have such a wonderful woman and partner in my life along with two deviously great kids. And what better way to celebrate an anniversary than to give a talk on Git and GitHub for Windows Developers!
UPDATE: Immediately after the talk we’re going to have a drinkup! Before I go further, I need you to soak in that logo for a minute. At first glance, it looks like it was...
Back in March of this year I had the honor and delight to give the opening keynote at CodeMania, a new conference in New Zealand. This conference was something special. I mean, just look at their beautiful lucha libre inspired site design. Although inexplicably, they switched to a pirate theme when it came to my profile image. Even so, it’s fun and the Twitter integration is a nice touch. It’s time for me to tweet something very inappropriate. On a personal level, this was a particularly special conference for me as it was the...
Next week Microsoft hosts its annual MVP Summit. So what better time for me to host my first GitHub Drinkup – MVP Edition at the Tap House Grill! Not an MVP? Nonsense! You are in my book, so show up! If you are an MVP, you’re still welcome to slum it with the rest of us schlubs. All the details are posted over at the GitHub Blog post. What is a “Drinkup” you ask? It’s pretty simple. It’s a meetup where we drink and share stories of valor in the face of code complexity....
UPDATE: I have a follow-up post that addresses a few criticisms of this post.
It all started with an innocent tweet asking whether ASP.NET MVC 3 is “open source” or not? I jumped in with my usual answer, “of course it is!” The source code is released under the Ms-PL, a license recognized that the OSI legally reviewed to ensure it meets the Open Source Definition (OSD). The Free Software Foundation (FSF) recognizes it as a “free software license”1 making it not only OSS, but FOSS (Free and open source software) by that definition. Afterwards, a healthy debate ensued on...
Mary Poppendieck writes the following in Unjust Deserts (pdf), a paper on compensation systems (emphasis mine), There is no greater de-motivator than a reward system that is perceived to be unfair. It doesn’t matter if the system is fair or not. If there is a perception of unfairness, then those who think that they have been treated unfairly will rapidly lose their motivation. Written over seven years ago, the paper is just as insightful and applicable today. For example, let’s apply it to the recent dust-up about the legitimacy...