I know I haven’t blogged like I wanted to when I started this adventure, so I thought I’d explain what I’ve been doing for the past few months. First of all I started taking classes towards my MBA back in January and have been spending a lot of time on that. I recently just completed my first class and did well on that and will be taking a few months off before I take my next class. I’m really excited to be back in school and working towards my MBA and have already learned some valuable skills that I will be able to use in my job. Most of those skills I’ve learned relate more to management, but I hope to use those skills someday in the future. There are a few things I picked up that I will be able to use in my everyday work life that I’m excited to get the chance to use.

I have also started working for a new company and am working solely on web applications. My previous company developed applications in ASP.Net WebForms and Windows Forms applications and I was ready for a change that would allow me to spend a majority of my time on web development. Currently I am working on converting classic asp pages to ASP.Net MVC and also helping the company improve their development practices using source control, testing servers, continuous integration, and many other development practices to help improve the quality of code that is deployed for our customers use. I’m excited about the new challenges that this job presents and extremely excited to be focusing a majority of my development time on the web. I know I have a long ways to go before I can call myself a good web developer but hopefully I can learn these technologies quickly.

Hopefully I will be making some blog posts over the next few months on web technologies that I am learning and becoming more familiar with as I start this deeper dive into web development. I am also hoping that maybe I can find a good topic and dive into it enough to give a presentation or two on it. I really want to get better at public speaking and maybe this is the chance to do that.

I saw someone mention on twitter a few weeks ago, about how they were intending to blog a review of a conference they were attending as well as each session they attended. I thought this was a really good idea, at that time I decided I was going to do the same thing starting with the Iowa Code Camp. So here it goes!

The day started with a nice drive down to Iowa City with some good developers/friends, two former coworkers and one of my co-leaders in CVINETA. We pulled up to Iowa Memorial Union and had to park on the top level of the only skyscraper in Iowa City, I swear we thought we were parking in the Tower of Babel;). After parking and locating the elevator, we made our way into the IMU and got checked into the Iowa code camp. After getting my bag of info I made my way to the food table to get a much needed breakfast, no way am I going to make it through a morning of sessions without stuffing my face full of food first(tasty donuts and different flavored bread).

Now that my belly was full I was ready to take in my morning sessions (I will review the sessions I attended below). There were a couple time slots in the ICC schedule that I just wasn’t sure which session I really wanted to see and the 1st session was one of those time slots. I ended up attending Dylan Moonfire’s - Zen and the Art of Coding Standards in the unfortunately named “Penn State” room, I attended this session because I have some strong opinions on coding standards and just wanted to get another point of view. For the 2nd session in the morning I went to one of the sessions I was looking most forward to at this years ICC, Jason Bock on Exceptional Development: Dealing with Exceptions in .Net. After the 2nd session it was lunch time (woohoo), after all the learning from the morning sessions I really needed to recharge and fill my belly again. As is a Code Camp standard we were supplied with sandwiches, by far this was the best setup for lunch that I’ve ever seen for a code camp and the food was really good as well. I’d give the lunch setup and organization two thumbs up. After lunch I started out attending Erik Lane’s - Up and Running with CruiseControl.Net, then Glenn Leifheit’s - I Need to Secure my Software, Now What?, and finally rounded out my afternoon with Donn Felker’s - Asp.Net MVC with the Spark View Engine.

Finally to round out my Iowa Code Camp trip, we all came back together for the always entertaining closing comments and prizes. As usual the organizers were loaded with some awesome prizes to give away and as usual I didn’t win anything, but this is always just one of the more enjoyable parts of any conference and the Iowa Code Camp guys put on an entertaining closing prize give away. I swear the organizers tour the country as a comedy troupe when they’re not spending their time in front of a computer. All in all I give this Iowa Code Camp 2 thumbs up, I would’ve given it an additional 5 stars but I didn’t win any prizes :(. One of the biggest things that crossed my mind when leaving the code camp was that I still cannot believe this is a free event, I would definitely pay ten’s of dollars, ok maybe hundreds :), to attend this type of event in the future. The only bad thing I could say about this event is that I wasn’t able to spend much time talking with others as much as I would’ve liked to, in the future I’m really hoping that I can make it to the after party of the Code Camp and get to spend time with my peers in a more relaxed and casual atmosphere. Finally I’d just like to thank the organizers of the Code Camp cause they’ve done an amazing job, and I wouldn’t expect anything less from the quality group of individuals who put this event together. Thank you and can keep up your amazing work.

Session Reviews:

Zen and the Art of Coding Standards - Dylan Moonfire I chose to attend this session because I’m a big believer in coding standards and feel they can make development easier and a lot less stressful, and getting the chance to hear someone else give an opinion is always a good thing. This was a really well put together presentation and was amazed at how many of the same ideas Dylan and I shared on coding standards. As the presentation went on, I couldn’t stop but think how closely Dylan’s and my ideas on coding standards mirrored those of Uncle Bob Martin. I got a majority of my ideas on coding standards from reading Uncle Bob’s book “Clean Code” and figured Dylan probably did as well. I ran into Dylan later in the day and was amazed to find out he had never heard of that book, and it just made me respect his presentation even more because he was able to come up with these standards through his own work experience. Coming away from the Code Camp I felt that my ideas on coding standards had only been strengthened by hearing Dylan’s presentation, and he gave some great ideas and tips on how to get coworkers to care about standards as well.

Exceptional Development: Dealing with Exceptions in .Net - Jason Bock This session was one of the sessions I was looking forward to the most at this ICC. First of all because I’ve seen Jason present before and he’s an amazing presenter and secondly I want to make sure I understand as much as I can about handling exceptions in my projects. Jason’s presentation did not disappoint one bit, he did an amazing job and gave some extremely useful information on exceptions that I had not come across before. To me this is one area of software you can not take for granted, because you’re only hurting yourself if you’re not properly dealing with exceptions. Jason gave some great advice and tips on how to make sure your logging/dealing with the proper exception. I took a lot of great things away from Jason’s presentation and made me realize you really need to think about how your going to handle exceptions and I hope to use what he taught me from now on.

Up and Running with CruiseControl.Net - Erik Lane I’ve followed Erik for awhile on Twitter and was really excited to see he was coming all the way from Colorado to present at ICC so I wasn’t going to miss this presentation. I also thought this topic would be very beneficial for me to use at work as well, since we don’t have CI server up and running yet. The presentation was very detailed and went into all the steps to setup CruiseControl.Net and did give me a some great ideas on how to use a CI server, but all the config sections seemed to be more then I really wanted to undertake to get a CI server setup. So when I setup my CI server I’ll probably using something a little easier to setup, probably something like TeamCity. But this was a great presentation, and I was able to chat with Erik a little more after the presentation on ways to get fellow developers to be more accepting of a CI server over looking the check-ins. It was also great to get the chance to meet Erik in person and look forward to chatting with him on Twitter more.

I Need to Secure my Software, Now What? - Glenn Leifheit This is a topic that I wish I could spend more time with personally. I was excited to see someone presenting on security at ICC, wish we could have had talks like this more in the past. The presentation was very good and covered some of the major risks that developers need to worry about when coding, and Glenn also listed and showed off a few of the tools that his company uses to search for vulnerabilities in their web applications. I thought the demo and listing of the tools to use for vulnerability testing was the best part of his presentation and I wrote many of them down (basically check out OWASP ). Hopefully in the future we’ll maybe see some presentations on defensive programming techniques or tips and tricks to prevent certain vulnerabilities in your code. I would love to see this type of presentation from the developers perspective.

ASP.NET MVC with the Spark View Engine - Donn Felker I have heard of Spark View Engine but hadn’t had the chance to do any work with it, and was really excited to see Donn was going to be presenting on it at ICC. Donn’s presentation was very good and covered a lot of details in spark, only down side in my opinion was that Donn seemed to really be rushed and I could tell it was because he had a ton of material to cover. I came away from this presentation just blown away at how easy writing code to be interpreted by a view engine could be, and how easy Spark made what could be difficult tasks just flow easily in your code. Coming away from this session I couldn’t wait to get home and download Spark and start working with it, and really can’t wait until intellisense is working for Spark in VS2010. I think Donn’s presentation just won me over to the Spark View Engine on my MVC apps.

I recently gave a presentation at the Cedar Valley .net User Group meeting in Cedar Falls, Iowa. The presentation was a 100 level presentation on source control and how it works for most .net programmers, and how programmers could use branching to help them manage their source control and projects.

The presentation went well, it was the first time I’ve ever presented but I thought I did a fairly good job. I did learn that I need to really practice a presentation a few more times before I give a talk and to try to relax before I start. Not much quality criticism on the presentation which is a good and bad thing, personally I think I need to work on how I use terms and make sure I don’t confuse one term with another when I’m talking. I’ll admit it is a little tougher when you are talking about source control because you have quite a few words that contain source or control in them and can easily get tongue tied and use the wrong term. Hopefully I can present another presentation again sometime soon and continue to improve on my technical and programming knowledge, and to become a better public speaker.

Here is the info on the presentation: Location: Cedar Falls, IA Date: January 12, 2010 Topic: Intro to Source Control and Branching

I wanted to get a post up for my goals for 2010, both as motivation by holding myself accountable for my goals and to share them with others. I will have a list of professional and personal goals.

Professional Goals:

1. Learn ASP.Net MVC, by either creating a project on my own or participating in an open source MVC project. My hope with learning MVC is that it will force me to obtain a better understanding of how web programming works and how to create a successful project with a different type of web development framework.
2. Along with MVC I’d like to get to a comfortable understanding of jQuery and be able to start using it on a more frequent basis in my web projects.
3. I would like to start blogging more and sharing my findings and ideas on what I’ve learned in software development, areas of concern I have, and give some ideas and thoughts on how and where I think developers and development teams can improve their development practices and projects. My goal is 50 blog posts in 2010. I may start off slow because I’m a new blogger but hopefully I can keep motivated and creating new posts.
4. I would also like to get involved in an open source project, I think this will give me the opportunity to be around some people that could mentor me and help me become a better programmer. Plus reading other programmers code is one of the best ways to learn in my opinion, only thing better is when you figure something out yourself.
5. Continue to help fellow software developers in my area improve their development skills. Currently I’m doing this as the president of the Cedar Valley .net User Group and would like to continue to work with the group and the local community. This might even include starting to present on technology topics at user group events.

Personal Goals:

1. Start working towards obtaining my MBA, recently I was accepted to the University of Iowa and am scheduled to start my first class this spring semester. I hope to continue that this year and really take my chance at an MBA very seriously, I think it will give me some great experience and knowledge. I hope that I will be able to take what I learn in the MBA program and help improve how software is created and developed for future development teams I work with.
2. To get back into good shape, I haven’t completely been inactive but not like I was early in 2009 and in years past. To help motivate myself I will find sporting events to train for and participate in, for example RAGBRAI and 5k’s. If I didn’t swim like a rock I would really like to attempt a mini triathlon.
3. Keep a positive outlook on life and tell my friends and family how much they mean to me as much as possible, this is important!
4. To quit using exclamation points so much :)!!!!!!

I hope you weren’t bored by my 2010 list and if anyone has any advice to comments on my list I’d love to hear them.

My name is Aaron and I wanted to start a blog to share my experiences with Software Development. These blog posts are not only a record for myself to look back at but also hopefully can help other software developers with issues or problems that I have already come across.

I would like to also add that views I express on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer or its affiliates.

Also another warning you might find some personal blog posts from time to time and I just hope you enjoy them, if you don’t I’m sorry and I will try to keep them in good taste!