Tonight was the "Paul Boag" Geek Dinner. I went to it, and had a great time. Before you read on, I must warn you that this is mainly about me and the people I met, and unless you're one of them, or you're slightly interested in me personally, then there probably won't be much to interest you here. You're free to go.

I met some great new people, and a couple of people I met a year ago at a previous geek dinner. I arrived early, as did a chap called Ryan, and we had a good long chat before the others got there. I didn't catch the name of the guy who is in the position that I was in recently, of being in a job for quite a while, and the role branching off the desired career track, to the point that changing jobs is actually quite hard. Fortunately I found an ideal job, so hopefully he will too. It was interesting talking to Shannon, as she's free to choose anywhere in the world to go to next, settle into and get a job. My life-choices (which I'm totally happy with) mean that I'm staying in Uckfield until further notice, so it was good meeting someone with the exact opposite situation. I'd like to know how that turns out.

The event was superbly arranged by Ian Forrester; who secured us a bar to ourselves, with a tasty-yet-reasonably-priced buffet. The buffet was a great idea, as it was a lot easier to chat to a range of people than it was at previous, sit-down geek dinners. Thanks Ian.

Two people I met briefly at the last geek dinner were present tonight. Last time I was sitting near enough to Nick to hear that he was an ASP.NET developer, but not near enough to have a conversation with him, so I was glad to have a chance to meet him again. We have a slight overlap in interests, as his brother works in the car industry too. I also spoke to Rachel briefly last time, and was very interested to find out that she once was involved in a kangaroo autopsy! I joined Nick and Rachel whilst they were talking with Henry, and the conversation had traversed the what-do-you-do stage, and had moved on to the group-banter stage, so I didn't find out much about Henry.

Paul Boag took the mic and spoke intelligently about the conflict between web standards for accessibility and real-world web developers (i.e. beginners and people who haven't been told that table-based layout isn't accessible). He was humorous and humble, and answered all manner of questions from the floor.

Next was the prize draw, with the fantastic prize of a pass for the SXSW Interactive conference in Texas, with hotel and flights thrown in (by shopzilla). We put our name-tags into a receptacle, and Paul pulled out the winner. Having won a really good book last week from Andy Budd's blog, I knew I wouldn't win this too. Turns out I was wrong. I did win. I'm jolly well going to Texas. Really! This is so exciting for me, as I have a desk job, so I never get to travel to interesting places. I've only spent 3 days in the States before, so being there for nearly a week will be a bonus too. Thanks Ian and Lee for arranging such a great prize, and Paul for picking my name out.

After that, I was in shock, and wasn't much of a conversationalist, so sorry to Ed, Bru and (I think his name was) Mark for not paying much attention to what you were saying. Actually, I did find out that Ed is a youth worker with an organisation that I'd heard of, and used to live in Sussex.

It turns out that Rachel has already booked to go to SXSW, so I'll know someone there too.

I learned some things tonight:

1. That I'm Microsoft to the core. I saw my very first laptop from a new startup called something like Apple, is it? Anyway, it's got this different operating system right, and the Alt-Tab icons are much nicer. I'll have to look in to this further.
2. The inside of a kangaroo pouch is skin, not fur.
3. The guy who I was speaking to a while ago about AJAX, and pronounced it eye-axe wasn't mad, just referring to the football team of the same name (and pronunciation, for that matter). It wouldn't be right if I didn't pick up on a pronunciation.
4. Geeks look like famous people. There was a Gerry Adams, Kiefer Sutherland and one other who escapes me for the moment.
5. The geek world is smaller than I thought, and I'm starting to find my way around, and linking areas together.

Anyway, it was a really good evening, and it still would have been good without winning such a fabulous thing. I grinned all the way back on the train. If that wasn't enough, Stephen Fry was on Radio 4 whilst I drove home from the station.

[As an aside, for those that care about this sort of thing, this is my first post using the performancing.com FireFox extension. It's good because it has a Technorati tag box, but bad because I can't find the spell checker (if it has one).]

[tags: geekdinner london sxsw uckfield]

So, you've been a developer for yonks, and you've just realised that you'll carry on being a developer for ever unless you get promoted (or fired). The obvious career path seems to be project management, then department management, then manager management (a few times), and finally director. But good developers don't necessarily make good managers. I know this, because I've worked for a couple. Most developers don't seem to want to be managers anyway, so what else is there?

1. Lead Developer. Take charge of a major component, and assist junior developers along the way. Make some big design decisions, and discuss with seniors how they will function.
   
2. Software Architect. Design the big picture, how the major pieces interact, and steer other people while they're building it.
3. Technical Strategist. (Probably not called that, but I don't know what they're called.) Become the expert for generic things across all the development teams in the organisation: coding standards, release management, re-use strategy, daily builds, researching new tools, technologies and techniques. Implement these across the teams.
   
4. Entrepreneur. Finish that handy utility, web application or telepathic UI that you've been tinkering with for months, pretty it up, and start selling it.
5. Educator. Work for Learning Tree, QA, or whoever, telling other developers how to do it, or lecture at schools, colleges and universities.
6. Contractor. If you've been working on the same sort of thing for a while, switching to short-term contracts for various companies may introduce some different challenges.
7. Consultant. Tell customers what approach they should take with their software projects, maybe designing or coding it for them.
8. Evangelist. Work for a large software product company, and extol the virtues of their latest products.
9. Author. Write books, articles and blogs about programming.
10. Change career. Work for a small or expanding company where programming skills wouldn't take up the majority of your time, but would give you an edge. Many smaller companies wouldn't employ a programmer, but an estate-agent, shop-keeper or magazine editor that could rustle up things to interface to third-party systems and write server-side wizardry for the website would be valuable.
11. Salesman. How often do salesmen promise customers completely unrealistic features? Have a real advantage over other salesmen by actually understanding what you're selling (and talking about!).
    
12. Software Tester. Catch the bugs that other developers introduce, and (as delicately as possible - developers are fragile) tell the developers to fix them.
    

I'm not as productive as I'd like to be, and I've recently discovered why. I don't sit around doing nothing. It sounds odd, I know, but there are times when sitting around doing nothing is better than doing something "constructive".

As a developer, I find a couple of situations require waiting for as much as 30 seconds before I can continue my task. For example, getting the latest version of the database scripts from source control, or compiling a multi-project solution.

If I know that I'll have to wait more than a few seconds, I'll have an internal conversation similar to the following:

"I know, while I'm waiting, I'll quickly read that email that arrived just now, or make a quick cuppa, or find out how Julian's getting on with re-writing the subtraction method, or something, or anything, just so long as I'm not sitting about waiting in an bowl of cold, damp unproductivity, waiting for my boss to catch me slacking, and then fire me, and then escort me out of the building without letting me collect so much as the photo of my children..."

So, I'll read the email that just arrived, which may need a reply, so I might as well do that while I'm there, or it's a link to an amusing video on Google, so I may as well watch it while I'm there, or I'll make a cuppa (and have to go and find some milk), or I'll talk to Julian, who says "Fine thanks, and by the way, did I tell you about my chess match last night? Well, Frank picked white, which makes a change..." and then five minutes have passed.

So instead of not writing code for 30 seconds, I'm not writing code for 300 seconds (or more, depending on how devious Frank was). It's extremely rare for anything to crop up that's more important than writing code (or whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing on any given day), so I'm better off "wasting" the 30 seconds staring at the screen watching the compiler do its thing than try to do something "useful".

We've now become a Microsoft Gold Partner.



After complaining about how much Visual Studio would cost, we'll now get it for free. With the Team System server.

Via Stefano Demiliano, I came across this really handy application today - Less MSIérables. It's a tool to list and extract the contents of an .msi file. This will be extremely useful when debugging installers.

Update: it also lists the contents of merge modules (.msm files).

[tags: msi msm installer]

I saw this recently:



An advert for Google's affiliate ad program in Yahoo's affiliate ad program. Nice.

[tags: yahoo google adsense]

Craig Murphy has announced that the next DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper day will be on 10th 3rd June 2006 at Microsoft in Reading.

The last one was really good, and I'm sure this one will be too.

[tags: developerdeveloperdeveloper dddiii developerday microsoft reading]