Personal Development – Living with technology

LIDNUG & Scott Guthrie – 15th Q&A on the 9th of January

LIDNUG presents Scott Guthrie’s 15th Open Q&A and the first event of 2013.

Scott has been coming back to LIDNUGs members each quarter for the past couple of years and it’s been one of the best sessions to get answers directly from The Gu himself.

In this session Scott answers questions on technical solutions, advices on implementations and draws comparisons between methodologies – all in the span of 90 minutes where his sole focus is to answer whatever question that comes in from the attendees.

My name is Scott Guthrie, and I am a Corporate Vice President in the Microsoft Server and Tools Business. I run a development team that works on the following products/technologies:

Windows Azure
ASP.NET
Entity Framework
WCF
WF
IIS
Service Bus
Cache
BizTalk
Visual Studio Tools for Web
Web Services and Workflow

Click here to register

FAQs

Where can I contact the organizer with any questions?
Use the following link and send us a question

Is there sufficient parking available at the venue?
Yes, parking is available at this Virtual Online Event. Just make sure you park the car in your drive-way, have a cup of coffee and log in.

Who can I blame if I can’t access the session?
Just blame Brian (it’s easier that way) => brian.madsen@lidnug.org

Will attending this event help my career prospects?
Of course, you will be able to bring a treasure trove of knowledge with you to your next job interview.

New horizons–a change is as good as a holiday

Back in August 2008 I joined Fujitsu Australia to take on a long term, SharePoint based project, as a SharePoint specialist. The project was challenging and rewarding, not without taking into consideration that I got to work with some excellent people, and as it’s drawing to a close there really isn’t much more for me to do.

Now, 4 years later, its time for me to look for other pastures. I’ve learned a ton of stuff and had a great experience, both by working with some of the best people in the industry, but also from a mentoring perspective. Fujitsu is a massive organisation, not just in Australia where it’s the third largest, but also internationally and the corporate learning that can come by being involved with global service offerings, from the ground up has really given me a new appreciation for enterprise solutions.

I’m leaving some very capable guys behind that truly knows what they’re doing – two colleagues who’s made my time at Fujitsu especially fun, such as Martin Abbott, probably one of the smartest guys I’ve ever had the fortune to work with, and Louis Mierowsky – one truly awesome architect – I appreciate all of you bearing with my eccentricities over the past 4 years. There’s other people who’s been a great influence to me, especially Omar Abdel-Alim has been there, all the way, teaching me so many things about corporate life and business.

This will also be a new experience for me – I get to work with another fellow MVP – in that I’ve actually worked with most of the senior guys there before. Mostly when you step into a new organisation you don’t just have to learn corporate policies, processes and people’s idiosyncrasies (including mine), but you also have to get to know the people you’ll now be working with. Luckily here I’ll know most of them so it should be a breeze to slip right in and get started with the serious stuff.

So now I’m off to join another big corporation – I accepted an opportunity with NEC Australia as a Snr. Solutions Architect in their Perth offices.

I’m very much looking forward to getting started and see where this journey will take me.

Input, Output and Actions – Back to basics

I was recently going through my RSS feeds and found an old article that I’d apparently earmarked for later reading. That seemed to start a trend and I kept going further and further back – several years back actually.

And that got me thinking….

What is the one trend that we (broad brush term) keep doing in this industry? We look forward…Constantly looking at what’s coming…what’s next…where do we go from here…where will “this” evolve to. We look at the gadgets, devices, frameworks, tools and services to innovate – because that’s where we are expected to look and then we moan when we don’t understand the basics – when that developer we just hired doesn’t get fundamental program construction or when we make mistakes ourselves.

We are quite often afraid to look at what we left behind – mostly because that’d make us be aware and acknowledge the mistakes we’ve made.

One of the bloggers out there that I quite often enjoy reading (i’m a consumer off his blog, not a participant) is Alberto Gutierrez and he’s the author of the blog that I’d bookmarked an entry from.

His blog entry “Forget about requirements, Software Development is all about inptus, outputs and actions” was what jump started my brain into gear and got me thinking about what I’m often doing wrong.

Labelling – i’m fanatical at labelling tasks

This helps me organise my work into segments that I can manage – or so I thought..Alberto’s blog entry must have sparked something that made me bookmark it back in 2009. And here it was. My labelling actually isn’t helping me. It’s making it unnecessarily complex. The fact of the matter is that it’s a task – one which has to be done – one which contributes to an overall goal. So, as Alberto puts it: It’s an input.

The result of that input is output – yeah, once the task has been completed of course.

I then set out to make this change to how I was managing things and the idea was to see if this would speed up what I set out to complete. Over a couple of weeks I did notice that the simplification of what I was doing was helping me spend less time organising and more time achieving.

I scrapped all my previous tasks lists and just made a single list. I use “Remember the milk” to manage my inputs – use whichever you want to use, the important thing really is that it’s available to you when you need it.

Full circle – looking back (or going back to basics) can quite literally be more valuable than to look for the future.

As Confucius said “Study the past if you would define the future”. It rang true with me and I’ve learned a valuable lesson. Making mistakes isn’t bad – as long as you recognise it, you can avoid making it again and that goes for all aspects of life really – not just for the professional side, but also in the personal.