I’m posting photos from our summer trip to Santa Barbara on Flickr. Today we hit the annual Solstice Parade, which is like a combination mobile hippie drum circle, dance-a-thon and doo-dah parade. Very community, weird and non-corporate, just the kind of parade I like.
We’re putting the finishing touches on our summer plans. It’s looking 99% likely that I will be in Santa Barbara from the end of June until the first week in August.
This will be a working vacation for me (the projects I’m currently committed to will chug along as normal). This isn’t happening for a few months yet, but I thought I’d mention it now in the context of consulting because I know there are a few technology companies in the area. So if you’re within spitting distance of Santa Barbara and you feel like you’d benefit from my experience, or you just want to grab coffee and shoot the bull for a few minutes, please let me know.
I’ll be speaking at VSLive San Francisco the first week of April. This time around I’ll be giving three talks:
If you’re going to be in town for the conference and want to set aside some time to get together and chat (particularly if you’re interested in getting some consulting help) please leave a comment.
Battery powered blenders rule by jeffreymcmanus.
Last weekend we did a fun family trip — we camped at Manresa State Beach, south of Santa Cruz, then on Saturday we drove down to Monterey to see the aquarium.
We took a lot of junk with us when we camped. It was a pain to lug to the campsite, but we used it all. Particularly useful was our new propane-powered camp stove (which we’ve been using to cook dinners out back on our deck at home) and a battery-powered blender which we used to make daquiris. We are living large in nature!
I am spending today preparing for my session at the MySQL conference on Thursday. I’ll be speaking on "MySQL and .NET in the Real World" which will cover my experience creating Approver.com and will also include a run-through of the Visual Studio integration with MySQL.
Last year I created a little command-line tool that generates MySQL data access classes for .NET 2.0. It’s the tool that generates the data access layer for Approver.com. I am going to open-source this tool this week, most likely before my talk on Thursday, and I will do a demo of the tool as part of my talk at the conference. This tool is very simple — it doesn’t do as much as, say, SubSonic or NHibernate. But it does automatically generate about 80-90% of the data access code used in Approver.com, and it has a few ease-of-use characteristics that I wanted — mainly a low learning curve, explicit support for MySQL and .NET 2.0 and no dependencies on external libraries other than what you find in the framework.
I need to do an intro/documentation page that describes the tool. I’ll get to that in the next day or two, then I’ll post here when it’s available.
No photos please by jeffreymcmanus.
This is the front yard of an outdoor surfboard repair shop in Haleiwa, Hawaii. They are doing an excellent job of making up their own novel interpretations of copyright law there.
Here’s a roundup of some of the speaking gigs I’m doing over the next few months:
You might not know it to hear me talk, but I suffer from a few minor professional insecurities. One of them has to do with speaking engagements, which I use as a major barometer of professional success. I did my first talk in front of a technical audience in 1987 (twenty frickin’ years ago, jeez) and since I threw it into high gear in 1996 I’ve flown around the world talking about software development at least a couple times a year.
Public speaking scares the crap out of most people. I happen to love public speaking, and I’m very confident speaking to an audience of virtually any size (getting a show-stopping round of applause during my presentation to 2,000 engineers and the executive team at Adobe’s annual engineering all-hands last year was a high point). But when I speak, I get hyper-focused and obsessive about preparation, and that causes me to go back and think about why I’m in front of this audience and what it all means.
One of the disorienting things about working for big companies like eBay or Yahoo is wondering whether your professional success is a function of the company you work for or whether it has something to do with your skills and experience. Are you objectively terrific or are you just riding the coattails of a worldwide brand?
My point (and I do have one) is that I seem to be getting about twice as many invitations to speak publicly this year as I did last year when I worked for Yahoo, which is extremely gratifying. So: big thanks to the conference organizers who have agreed to subject their audiences to me in 2007.
Just got a notice from United Airlines that they’re changing the terms of their frequent flier program. If you don’t earn or redeem miles in an 18 month period, you lose the miles completely. They posted a FAQ that explains the rule change. The kicker is this one:
Q. Do other airlines have similar policies?
A. Yes. For example, Delta and US Airways both recently made [similar] changes to their policies.
Remember when there was lots of competition in the U.S. airline industry, flights were cheap and service was good? Good times, good times.
The United change probably won’t affect me anytime soon since I redeemed some miles last year for a trip back east, but it will have an affect on lots of frequent fliers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley since SFO is a United hub.
I am extremely excited to be making my hopefully-triumphant return to the VSLive conference in San Francisco in March.
I started speaking at VSLive in 1997 (back when it was called VBITS). I spoke at most of the VSLive conferences in the U.S. in Europe through 2001 when I went to work for eBay. I even took time out from my honeymoon in 2000 to speak at the VBITS conferences in London and Stockholm (you can imagine how difficult it was to convince my fiancee to add two European capitals to our trip).
VSLive has been one of my favorite conferences to speak at for a couple of reasons. One is its practical focus — it’s about getting things done in the real world instead of talking in grand strategic terms about what technology means, etc. I also really like the mix of Microsoft insiders combined with the regional directors and other consultants — it seems to keep the agenda honest and grounded.
I’ve also made some great friends over the years at these conferences, particularly Andrew Brust (who I met at VBITS Berlin in 1997, the night before he was carted off to the hospital after suffering a fall onstage), Chris Kinsman, who I co-authored two books on ASP.NET with, and Deborah Kurata, who I had an extremely productive working relationship with for a few years in the late 90s.
I have been pitching talks on open-source tools to VSLive for a bunch of years. In 2001 I tried to get them to let me do a talk on NUnit. I was really passionate about unit testing around this time and I was crushed that they didn’t have room for my talk on the schedule that year. Unfortunately, a lot of Microsoft platform developers didn’t get unit testing religion until a unit-testing tool was included with Visual Studio four years later — and only then if you shelled out the big bucks for Visual Studio Team System. NUnit is still a great tool, by the way, and it’s 100% free — I still use it and highly recommend it.
Anyway, I’ve been spending a lot of my time in the last five months coding an ASP.NET application using MySQL, so I figured it might make sense to share what I’ve learned about the pros and cons of MySQL with VSLive attendees. So I’m delighted to announce that my March VSLive talk will be on Programming MySQL with .NET.
I am not sure if this is the first VSLive talk to cover an open-source product, but I am pretty sure that it will be the first MySQL talk at VSLive, which makes it infinitely more exciting for me. I am going to bust my croutons to make this talk as good as the ASP talk I gave around 1999 (in which I demonstrated a common security flaw in ASP and three or four people in the audience unexpectedly jumped up, opened their cell phones and ran out of the room in a panic — that was pretty fun).
If you’re using MySQL with .NET, or you’re just interested in learning more about it, I’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions in comments. My plan is to cover the basics of a data-driven app using ASP.NET and MySQL, hit some of the subtle syntactical differences between MySQL and SQL Server, and then cover some goodies like MySQL stored procedures. If there’s something else on that list you’d like to see, let me know.
I am off to the east coast on Saturday to spend some time with family in NYC as well as hobnobbing at a few technology and business confabs next week:
I will be speaking and giving live demonstrations of Approver.com twice in the next few weeks.
The first demo will be at the Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup in Palo Alto tonight (October 3).
The next will be at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco next week. The conference is October 11-12 but my session will be at 10AM on Thursday the 12th. The session is a competitive series of lightning demos; Approver is going up against a dozen or so other "Office 2.0" tools and applications. At the end the audience will vote for their favorite demo, so if you’re going to the conference and you’re an Approver.com fancier, do please attend and vote for your favorite beige web site.
I’ll also be speaking (although probably not demoing) at the Evans Development Products Conference in San Jose on Friday, October 20. This talk will be less about consumer sites and more about my experience developing, launching and managing platform products for developers, so if you want a taste of what I’ve been doing on the consulting side, here’s your chance.
Update: Just got word that the Evans conference is cancelled, so if you want to see the McManus Approver.com floor show, your only chance will be at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week.
I’ll be at the STIRR Mixer in San Francisco next Wednesday. I attended one of these a few months back and found it to be very valuable and fun. It’s always inspiring to see what other entrepeneurs are up to.
If you’re going to be there too and you want to talk Approver.com or if you want to talk consulting, please do come find me. I am all about the networking these days.
I’ll be speaking on a panel at the upcoming Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco October 12-13.
"Office 2.0" refers to Web 2.0 productivity applications — stuff to help you save time online, get stuff accomplished, and share your work with others. Many of these apps (too many, I’d argue) involve creating not-quite-good-enough versions of conventional client applications like editors and database applications in the browser, but a lot of them are starting to take advantage of the unique properties of the web to facilitate things that aren’t easily accomplished using client software.
We’re on the cusp of something very interesting with Web-based productivity applications. The next year or two is going to be revolutionary as people begin to utilize the Web to achieve things that simply aren’t possible using existing client productivity suites. The key, I think, is to refrain from re-inventing Word for Windows 2.0 in the browser and focus on the things that make the web a unique medium: always on, accessible from any browser and any device, powered by people with user preferences at the center of everything, and so forth.
I was in the audience at an Under the Radar session on Office 2.0 applications last night. It was an interesting preview of what we’ll see at the conference in October. All four demos were quite impressive; Zoho deservedly took the audience choice prize. The depth of what those guys are doing is nothing short of amazing.
As I mentioned on the blog last week, I’m currently working on a web-based tool that attacks a small facet of document-sharing that has bugged the crap out of me for years. The site is almost ready for public consumption, but if you’d like an advance peek, let me know and I’ll hook you up.
Santa Cruz Panorama by jeffreymcmanus.
We’re having a little family holiday in Santa Cruz this weekend. This is the view outside our hotel room. (The original size has more detail.)
I’m off next week on a couple of trips, first to Boston on Tuesday for a couple of days of meetings with Patty Seybold and her posse of customer-experience-loving, service-oriented ninjas and ninjettes. Then I’m off to Amsterdam to give a keynote talk at XTech. It looks like there will be a bunch of excellent talks there, more than enough to keep me out of trouble — I’m particularly looking forward to Ajax Developer’s Day.
In addition to the aforementioned Evans Data Developer Relations conference, here are the other upcoming speaking engagements I’m signed up to do:
I’m not committing to any travel after XTech because of the impending baby event (3 weeks before the due date is cutting it kind of close anyway).
Pretty much out of nowhere, my calendar has filled up with all manner of speaking engagements. Coming up is the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in San Francisco on Monday February 6, where I’ll be giving a talk about, you know, developer relations and stuff. I’ll post more about the other gigs after I get the details squared away.
Sitting listening to venture capital dudes talk about their relevance in a world in which the cost of starting a new company has gone down to about what it costs to pay a graduate student’s rent. Hmmmm. Nice to think about this kind of stuff.
I’m on a panel on mash-ups later this afternoon. Dave posted details on his blog.
I’ll be heading up to Portland tomorrow night with my whole team for OSCON. I’ll be giving a talk on Yahoo! Web Services and Konfabulator on Wednesday morning and I’ll be in the Yahoo! booth on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday. Stop by and say hi if you’re at the show.
Update: Here’s the description of the talk I’m going to give on Wednesday morning. This will be the first public demo of Konfabulator 2.1 as far as I know and definitely the first demo of our new comparison shopping API, which just launched on Tuesday.
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