Monday, October 31, 2016

November 2016 Speaking Engagements

October has been crazy busy. I was on the road for 19 days, but it was totally worth it. November is a bit slower (although I'll still be out and about a bit). I've got 2 speaking engagements coming up in the Phoenix area.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016
North West Valley .NET User Group
Glendale, AZ
Meetup Site
o Topic: Practical Reflection in .NET

I always have a great time when I'm in the Phoenix area. This time around, I'll be talking about how reflection is useful to everyday developers. Reflection is a very powerful tool, but if you aren't creating developer tools or frameworks, it seems to be of limited use. But there are a few elements that we can use to make our code easier to extend. We'll look at dynamically loading business rules in a system and see that it takes very little actual code. Cool stuff.

Thursday, November 17, 2016
South East Valley .NET User Group
Chandler, AZ
Meetup Site
o Topic: Abstract Art: Getting Abstraction "Just Right"

Abstraction is another topic that has been very important in my world. When I talk about interfaces and dependency injection (especially), I show how abstraction can make our world a better place. But if we take things too far, we end up with code that is hard to debug and maintain. We'll work on finding the right balance of abstraction in our code, so that we can get things "just right".

A Look Back
October was really busy, really fun, and really exhausting. But I'm glad that I did it. The month started out with a trip to the Silicon Valley Code Camp. I talked about this previously.

The following week, I did 3 talks at the Desert Code Camp in Chandler AZ. I've been to this event 8 times, so I was really glad to see it come back this year. Here's a picture of me talking about unit testing:


In addition, I got to make a stop at Organ Stop Pizza. They have an amazing organ that you have to see to believe:


A couple weeks later, I headed to St Charles MO for Dev Up. This was my first time at this event, and I had heard really great things about it. My presentations on design patterns and dependency injection were a lot of fun. Sorry, no photos of me speaking, but I do have a photo of me with some of my speaker friends at the attendee party:


Guess which one is me.

From there I headed to Des Moines IA for Prairie.Code(). This was a great event. If I hadn't known, I never would have guessed that this was a first-time event. Not really hard to believe since it was put on by the same folks who do the really good Nebraska.Code() event.


Thanks to Heather Downing (@quorralyne) for the great picture of me in my over-caffeinated shirt during my Clean Code talk.

I also had a couple days to spend in Des Moines. This was great for me since it was my first time in Iowa. I got to the world's largest truck stop, the zoo, the art museum, and the sculpture garden.

Upcoming Events
I'm not going to be standing still for very long. Next week, I head to the Microsoft MVP Summit in Redmond WA. This is a chance for me to spend time with a lot of my friends from all over the world. I wish I could see them more often.

In December, I'll be speaking at Visual Studio Live! in Orlando. I've got 3 talks scheduled, including Lambda Expressions, Unit Testing, and Task & Await. These are all things I love to talk about, and I'm really looking forward to being a part of this event again.

In January, I'll be heading back to NDC London. I'm really excited about getting another opportunity to speak here. I'll be giving 2 talks, one on delegates in C#, and one on making the world a better place by focusing on our users. It should be a great time.

The hard part about all of this traveling? It's looking at things like this:


My cats have been seeing me leave quite a bit. I just got back from an 11 day trip, and they really missed me (which must be really bad because cats normally don't show that).

I'm not sure how busy my schedule will be next year. I'm trying to balance the travel (which I love) with getting enough rest (which doesn't happen when I'm on the road). I'm still playing things by ear at the moment. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it soon. See you at an upcoming event!

Happy Coding!

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