I’ve been involved with the .NET community for about four years now.  I existed on the fringe for some time, but it wasn’t until James Avery approached me about helping revitalize the .NET User group in the area that I really started to feel part of a larger community.  Actually, I don’t feel like the community in Cincinnati really started to take off until James and Jim put on the first Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp (which has evolved into the Central Ohio Day of .NET (CODODN)).

One of the great things about being a part of the community is meeting some really interesting and smart people.  Especially over the last year I feel like I’ve really gotten to meet some of the brightest minds in the community.  Some of these people speak at events and travel around to user groups.  Some of the people write books that we as professional developers read to increase our skills.  Still others of these people are simply event attendees or bloggers who I’ve come in contact with.  These people make up our community and I’m glad to be a part of that. 

At the devLINK conference this year there was an Open Space session where the topic of community was brought up.  The discussion wound down many rabbit holes but one of those holes really got to me:  the concept of RockStars.  There are many people in our community which are loud and energetic.  These are the people we see standing up to give technical presentations or organizing events.  These are the people that dominate (or at least seem to dominate) the Open Spaces and community discussions.  Now, I’m not saying this is a bad thing.  On the contrary, every community has a group of leaders and recognizable figures and ours isn’t any different.  These are the people that in the community are known as the “RockStars”.

The thing is our community isn’t just made up of RockStars (I hate that term).  The community is made up of a great number of really intelligent developers who are passionate about technology.  Not everyone has the desire to stand up and yell their knowledge to the world at large.  Some just aren’t plugged into the community because they don’t know it exists or simply have other priorities that are in conflict with becoming overly involved.

I’d like to meet more of these people.  So, in order to help facilitate that I’ve decided to shine a spotlight on someone I think could be a great contributor to the community.  Not necessarily someone who speaks or blogs a great deal, but who is passionate about technology.  Someone I think could be a huge contributor to the community even if they play a small role.

Meet Brian Carter.  He’s a System’s Architect for a company in Louisville, KY.  Brian has done a lot of research and has even published some.  His blog is pretty new (I really like his theme), but has some good insights so I’d recommend subscribing.  You can also follow him on Twitter as brianscarter. 

I had the opportunity to meet Brian at an ArcReady event in December, and then again at the nPlus1 Winter Summit.  I think Brian has a lot to offer the community and I hope to get him up to one of the CinARC meetings to share his knowledge.

Call to Action -

I’d now like to ask each of you in the community to do the same thing I have done and introduce someone who think could make great contributions to the community.  Again, they don’t have to be someone with a huge online presence, an author, etc.  In fact, if they are that, then likely we already know who they are.  Please link back to this post so that readers of this post can follow all the new introductions.

I’m very psyched about this year’s CodeMash.  From the precompiler event, to the open spaces, to the myriad of awesome sessions.  If you’ll be at the event then look around for me (I’ll be the short guy trying to grow back his beard and balding on top).

I still need to plan out my sessions and figure out what I’m doing on precompiler day.  Hmmm…decisions, decisions, decisions.

It’s that time again when one year is closed out and we look forward to the next revolution around the sun.  2008 turned out to be an okay year for me for the most part.  Several aspects went REALLY well, and others not so much.  I thought I’d do a little retrospective on 2008.

Things that went well:

• I celebrated my sixth anniversary this year.  Six years and my wife still likes me!
• I accepted a new role at Strategic Data Systems (SDS) as one of the Microsoft Practice Directors. This has been a great opportunity for me.  My primary duty is still working as a consultant with our clients, which means I’m mainly still doing development, which I love.
• I joined Twitter after the Central Ohio Day of .NET (CODODN) and was surprised that I actually liked it.  I’ve found a wealth of knowledge and contacts through this social network.
• We had another great Central Ohio Day of .NET in 2008 (otherwise known as the Cincinnati-Dayton Area Code Camp).  We’ve got the ball rolling on 2009 so I’m looking forward to helping organize that.
• My professional network has grown tremendously this year.  From doing more talks, to being on Twitter, to attending more community events I’ve definitely met a lot of great people this year and made  many new contacts.
• I was able to get the Cincinnati Software Architecture Group (CinARC) off the ground after nearly two years of just thinking about it.  Now we just need to mature the group and help it find it’s way.
• The Cincinnati .NET User Group (CINNUG) had an awesome year and I’m proud to be leading it.  We picked up a new special interest group (CinARC), held new “Special events” and grew slightly on our monthly attendance.  We had our first real elections this year and I was re-elected as Lead Director.  I’d really like to see the attendance grown in 2009 and I’m excited about having the new Directors on board with fresh ideas.  I’ll miss Nino and Dan keeping me in my place though.
• My goal for 2008 was to give 5 presentations and I blew that out of the water!  I gave a total of ten technical presentations in 2008 starting with the Dayton .NET Developers Group in January.  I was even honored to be selected to speak at the devLINK conference.  I already have four presentations scheduled for 2009 including a Michigan Tour in May.  If you’d be interested in having me come speak, just let me know.  I really enjoy speaking and teaching so I look forward to improving my speaking skills in 2009 and giving more presentations in the new year.
• I helped launch nplus1.org, a web source for software architecture.  It was really good working with James, Chris and Brian to get this off the ground.

Things that went okay:

• My son turned three this year.  It takes a LOT of my energy to try to be a good father and I hope I’m doing a good job.  I would say being a father is the hardest thing that I do.  So far I like being around him more than most kids his age so my wife and I must be doing something correctly. 
• I have been using the “Getting Things Done” methodology to keep myself organized, but I’ve been slipping by not doing my weekly reviews regularly and hardly ever getting to my monthly reviews. This is listed as going okay because I think I can do a lot better if I can get the reviews worked into my schedule on a more regular basis.
• I have read about fifteen books or so over the year, both technical and non-technical.  I need to ramp this up a bit and take a page from Brian’s playbook and start doing some audio books during my commute.  I’ve been listening to podcasts during that time, but I could be more selective regarding which episodes of the podcasts I listen to and get some books in as well.

Things that need work:

• While I’ve focused a great deal on improving my mind I’ve not done much for the soul or the body.  My wife says I don’t take enough “me” time.  I attended a meditation group to see if I would like it and it turned out to be more than I was looking for.  I need to find a happy medium between the spiritual aspects and the ability to quietly have a few minutes of time to clear my mind and refresh myself.  Some meditation gurus would say what I’m looking for is impossible as you can not have one without the other.  I disagree and will endeavor to seek some way to gain this middle ground.  At one time I had the idea of a retreat weekend with no electronics (except my Zune for music).  I need to get that planned.
• I also was very lacking in taking care of my body this last year.  I rarely made it to the gym to exercise and I definitely don’t eat well.  This is will be a MAJOR life change for me and will probably be on of the most difficult things I try to improve upon.  I’m not overweight, but could stand to loose a few pounds.  The biggest benefit I get from the exercise is that when I’m doing it regularly I don’t have back aches as often.  So, much like Jeff, I’m going to trying to skip the pizza at the User Group Meetings.
• I’ve spent a good deal of my own time doing software community oriented things (which were all things that I enjoyed doing and were listed as “things done well”) and that has cut into time with the family.  I have a VERY understanding wife, but I need to dedicate some time to specifically doing things with the family more than I did in 2008.  Perhaps schedule a few more weekends to take a short trip or camp out in the back yard in 2009.
• I’m over-extending myself too much sometimes.  I need to re-learn the word “NO” (outside the usage of it around my 3-year old) and use it. 
• My blog has suffered greatly.  I had high hopes for my .NET Nugget series, but after a year of existence it’s only seen 21 posts.  I’d really like to ramp up that series and have at least two a month.  If I could just knock a bunch out and schedule them to post later that would be great.

Well, that’s what I can come up with.  Looks like I need to work on get more exercise, better time management and start writing more.  Something tells me that Retrospective 2009 is going to say I need to get more sleep.  I’m sure I’ll come up with other goals that will supersede these, but hey…that’s just staying agile, right?

The first ever nPlus1.org ArcSummit is today!  We are starting off with lunch at noon at the Microsoft office (a warm pasta bar....yum!).  After/during lunch we'll get started with some talk about S+S and Cloud Computing.  The rest of the afternoon will be a mix of open discussion and presentations so that when everyone leaves they'll have a better understanding on how these technologies and approaches can help them.

There is still space on the registry!  http://shrinkster.com/138t.

Don’t forget that next Tuesday is the first ever nplus1.org ArcSummit event!  Free, catered lunch (no pizza here!) and great conversation about Cloud Computing and S+S.  What more can an architect ask for?  There is still plenty of time to register.

It would appear that ever since I updated my site to Graffiti CMS 1.1 my RSS feed was broke.  Someone had pointed out to me that the http://mvwood.com/blog link they had been pointing to was broke some time ago and when I researched the issue I found it was because somehow the update had either modified or biffed the category ID of my blog (someone else had the same issue as well).  I corrected the default.aspx file in the /blog directory and then everything worked fine, but little did I know that the same issue had biffed my feed.

I subscribe to my own feed so that normally I can see everything coming in, but I was so far behind on reading I didn’t notice my own posts weren’t there in the reader.  DOH! 

So, since September it would appear that none of my posts have been published to people reading my blog via RSS readers.  FeedBurner didn’t seem to think there was a problem for some reason so I was never alerted that there was an issue.

Now that it’s fixed I look forward to people’s comments on what I’ve had to say for the last few months.

nPlus1.org and Microsoft have teamed up to give a series of free ArcSummit events! The first of these events will be in less than two weeks on December 16^th. I know it’s close to the holidays, but as things are winding down before vacations wouldn’t it be cool to spend some time with like-minded folks talking about how S+S and cloud computing can help your business and clients.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008 12:00 PM (Noon) - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 5:00 PM Eastern Time
Microsoft Office - Cincinnati
MPR Room
4605 Duke Drive
Suite 800 Mason Ohio 45040

The event will consist of presentations and open discussions on two topics:

• How Software + Services may provide business value
• Cloud Computing in General and an Introduction to Windows Azure

Lunch will be provided starting at noon.

Register Here!

I gave a presentation today at the ArcReady event in Mason on “Organizational Dynamics”.  This talk was designed to talk about how Organizations are structured and how best to navigate them.  I thought it went over pretty well.

If you couldn’t make the session, or if you did and want my slide deck, then you can download it.

Save the date!  The Central Ohio Day of .NET (CODON) will be held on Saturday, April 18th!  Last year we held the event at the Roberts Center and it turned out to be the perfect middle spot between Dayton, Columbus and Cincinnati.  This year we plan on adding a full day of Open Spaces as well as a dedicated SQL Server track (the CincySQL crew has joined CINNUG, Dayton .NET Developers Group and the Central Ohio .NET User Group in hosting the event).

Look for more information over the next month.

[EDIT: Corrected spelling]

Do you live in the Cincinnati area?  Or perhaps somewhere between Cincinnati and Sandusky, OH?  If so and you’re interested in doing a ride share for CodeMash then jump over to the CINNUG forums where we have a thread for people to organize their rides.

For example, I’m looking for a ride on the way up since my family is coming up on Friday.