I wanted to take some time and thank the organizers of BarCamp Des Moines, they did another amazing job this year.  This was the 2nd Des Moines BarCamp and also my 2nd time attending and I have to say this is quickly becoming one of my favorite events of the year.  You could call it a conference if you want but it really isn't in the same sense, if you're curious as to what BarCamp is check out wikipedia. One of the big reasons why I enjoy this event is because it's not all technical, there are technical people in attendance but there are also designers, businessmen, entrepreneur, and regular Joe's as well.  Because of this mix you get some really interesting presentations and conversations happening throughout the day, and thats what I enjoy about this event.

This year's event was even better than last years, and I think that had to do with everyone knowing what to expect and how to prepare.  The first session I went to was actually one I attended last year and got so much out of that I for sure wanted to attend again this year.  The session was simple, name one of your favorite books and give a description on why people should read it.  I got so much out of last years and was definitely not disappointed this year, and now have a few more books on my must read list.

The rest of the day I tried to participate/attend in sessions that were outside of what I deal with on a day to day basis (programming).  Here are some of the high points from those sessions:

• Take the time and find a way to design with emotion, it helps create a relationship between your product and your customers.  If you design with emotion and make a mistake your customers will be ticked but will also forgive you, where if you don't create the relationship with your customers and you make a mistake that customer may leave and never come back.
• To help yourself create/come up with new ideas you need to get out of your comfort zone, take the time to meet new people and hear new ideas.  If your always talking and hanging out with the same people you'll never give yourself the chance to meet that one new person who will inspire and help you take that next big step in your life. 
• Take the time to organize your life, and remove distractions so you can focus on one thing at a time.  Multi-tasking only gives the illusion of productivity, you get more done when you only focus on getting one task done at a time.  I'm already trying to do this with Evernote and following the GTD techniques described in David Allen's "Getting Things Done" book.  I have definitely  noticed a difference in how I get things done when I'm following these ideas. 
• I also got into an impromptu Regular Expression session that was really interesting, because this is something I do use every day in my work life.  It was really beneficial to get an experts point of view in how they view RegEx and how they use it in their everyday work. The RegEx tips and tricks are definately going to help out, multiline who knew?

Last year I ended up leaving before the event ended but this year I stuck around and went to the after BarCamp meal.  This was a lot of fun, because you can't beat free pizza and pop ;).  I was able to enjoy a good conversation with a friend of mine from the Cedar Valley .net user group and also got to meet and talk with some really interesting people I would've probably never met otherwise.  I hope the guy who did the session on, meeting new people to create ideas, would be proud, I extended my Venn diagram and had a lot of fun doing it.   

I can't wait to see what next years BarCamp has to offer, thank you again to the organizers.

Was helping someone with an ajax issue the other day and to help diagnose what the error was I wrote a little jQuery code to display error information at the bottom of the page.  I'm sure there are about a thousand other plugins and posts out there for displaying error information about ajax requests, but thought I'd share mine anyways in hopes that it would help someone out.

<script type="text/javascript">
               $('body').ajaxError(function (e, jqxhr, settings, exception) {
            $('div#ajaxLog').empty();
            $('div#ajaxLog').remove();
            $(this).append('<div ID="ajaxLog" style="background-color:Red;"></div>')
            var log = $('div#ajaxLog');
            $(log).append('Response Text: ' + jqxhr.responseText + '<br />');
            $(log).append('Status: ' + jqxhr.status + '<br />');
            $(log).append('Status Text: ' + jqxhr.statusText + '<br /><hr>');
            $(log).append('Data: ' + settings.data + '<br />');
            $(log).append('Data Types: ' + settings.dataTypes + '<br />');
            $(log).append('Type: ' + settings.type + '<br />');
            $(log).append('Url: ' + settings.url + '<br /><hr>');
            $(log).append('Exception: ' + exception + '<br />');
        });    </script>

You'll end up with something looking like this:

Hopefully this helps you out if our run into some issues with your ajax requests.

I recently had the opportunity to give a presentation on performing ajax requests with jQuery at the CVINETA user group in Cedar Falls, IA. I thought the presentation went fairly well, lots of small improvements I can make to it, but over all it went well.  My biggest area I need to improve on is taking less time on the slides and spend more time on the demo part of the presentation.

If you are interested in viewing my slides and demo application you can get the files here.

My demo spent time covering the get, getJSON, post, and ajax methods in jQuery and how you can use those methods with an ASP.Net MVC application.  I also took some time and covered how you can use jQuery templates to display data on a web page from an ajax request.

If you made it to my presentation, thank you for coming out and if anyone has any suggestions for areas I missed or needed to cover more please let me know.

Aaron

I'm a religious person and came across this passage in my daily readings and felt I should share it.  It pertains to all things in life, but I can see its value and power when looking at it from a technical and entrepreneurial point of view.

"Do not let your failures define you.  They are not how God measures you.  In fack, they are how the enemy wants to measure you; that's why he asks to sift you.  Don't trust his measurement.  Trust Jesus.  He has prayed for you."

In closing, listen to those who support you, those who lift you up from failures and dust you off.  They are the ones who will support you and count your successes.  Don't spend time listening to those who count your failures, they are only trying to hold you down and prevent you from believing in yourself.

So if you've fallen, dust yourself off, get up, and do something to make the world a better place.

Aaron

This is a personal blog post, and just wanted to share with everyone that I got married a few weeks ago to my best friend, Lauren.  It was an awesome day, a little hot, wedding was amazing and filled with so many close friends and relatives.  My wife Lauren and I couldn't have asked for a better day, well less heat.  Thanks to everyone who attended the wedding and a very big special thanks to all those that helped make our day so special.  We both thought it was really cool how our entire wedding was filled with friends and family, even down to the musicians, photographer, and deacon.  It just made the whole experience even more special knowing that we were totally surrounded by love and friendship.

I want to give some props to our guitar player / singer Andy Juhl, I went to high school with this guy and was so blessed to have him be able to play for our wedding.  If you've never heard his music before its amazing, you should go check it out at www.andyjuhl.com.

Another person / group that did an amazing job was our photographer, Danny Vasquez.  Danny, his wife Jessie, and assistant Jennifer did an amazing job and were there almost the whole day taking some amazing shots and dealing with the intense heat.  Thanks can not be said enough for how they handled the heat and made our shots look so awesome!  The temps were reaching over 100 degrees on the wedding day. 

Below is a video montage Danny put together with some of the photo's he took on Lauren and I's wedding day.

Thanks to everyone else who helped make our wedding so special, we can't say thanks enough for all you did.  Love you all!

Aaron & Lauren