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Geek It Happened to Me

Developer Junior: Making Your Own Movies with Live Movie Maker / Appearing on “Webnation”

Here’s episode 2 of Developer Junior, the show where “Junior” the puppet (played by Brian Hogg of Hoggworks Studios) and I show kids how to make the most out of their technology. In this episode, Junior and I go Hollywood and make a quick little movie using Live Movie Maker, which runs on Windows and you can download for free.

In case you missed the previous Developer Junior episode, in which Junior and I build a video game using Kodu, you can watch it here.

Webnation: Amber Mac, Joey deVilla and "Junior"

Junior and I are headed to CP24’s studios tonight to do an interview with Amber Mac and Maurice Cacho on their show, Webnation, where we’ll be talking about Developer Junior, technology, kids and how they all fit together. If you’re in the Toronto area, tune in tonight to CP24 at 7:10 p.m. to catch our interview live; if you’re, you can see the interview online when they post it to the Webnation site.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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It Happened to Me Play

Scenes from Last Night’s Bombay Sapphire Rooftop Party

A little life hint: if someone invites you to a rooftop party where a celebrity chef is cooking and they’re serving gin, always RSVP with “yes”.

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The party was a Bombay Sapphire promotional event featuring Food Network Canada chef Rob Rainford, who cooked some delicious dishes using gin as an ingredient. Co-presenting with him was Merlin Griffiths, Bombay Sapphire’s “Global Brand Ambassador”.

When this computer fad blows over, I think I’ll become a brand ambassador for a liquor company – it looks like fun!

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These photos feature Yours Truly shaking up a “Southside”, which is essentially a mojito made with gin instead of rum, and it’s pretty nice.

There are more photos, including Rob Rainford cooking delicious dishes on my Flickr set of the event.

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If you want to try out the recipes we were shown, they’re posted here.

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It Happened to Me

Uh-oh…

Screen capture from Twitter: "Hi, Joey deVilla. Karl Rove (KarlRove) is now following your tweets on Twitter."

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Geek It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Toronto Code Camp: Saturday, May 1st!

Toronto Code Camp logoThe 5th annual Toronto Code Camp takes place next Saturday, May 1st, in the SEQ building on Seneca College’s York Campus (Seneca@York). If you’re a developer who builds or is thinking of building on the .NET platform, you want to catch this free event!

Last year’s event had over 350 attendees who caught 25 sessions, including the infamous “Data Bondage with Silverlight”, which opened with the equally infamous “assless chaps and accordion performance”. I make no guarantees this year, other than that I’ll be there and that this year’s event will be the biggest and best one yet, with a whopping 40 sessions arranged into 8 tracks.

Seneca@York campus at night

Code Camp happens because of Chris Dufour, .NET community guy extraordinare, who’s been making it happen for the past few years. It’s a free-as-in-beer event, a labour of love carried out by Chris and a team of dedicated volunteers and funded by generous sponsors including The Empire.

Here’s a run-down of Toronto Code Camp 2010’s agenda:

Time What’s Happening
8:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. Registration
9:00 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. Keynote
9:30 a.m. – 10:45 a.m. Sessions

10:45 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Break
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Sessions

12:15 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Lunch
1:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. Sessions

2:45 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Break
3:00 p.m. – 4:15 p.m. Sessions

4:15 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Break
4:30 p.m. – 5:45 p,m. Sessions

5:45 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Break
6:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. Closing
6:30 p.m. “The Hive” Afterparty
If you want to attend this event, please register!
Later After the afterparty, a tour of York University’s astronomy observatory!

 

I’ll be present at the event, making myself useful as an official Microsoft representative and as a Windows Phone 7 Champ and Azure go-to guy.

Toronto Code Camp takes place in the SEQ building at Seneca’s campus at York University, which is at 70 The Pond Road. Click the map below to see a Bing map and get directions:

Map to Toronto Code Camp (70 The Pond Road)

See you there!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Geek It Happened to Me Work

EnergizeIT Academic Visits

Ah, student life. While waiting to do a presentation at Fanshawe College in London, I had a quick student lunch, pictured below:

Slice of pizza, glass of coke and a flyer for a "Rock/Paper/Scissors tournament"

Damir and I have been touring all over the country over the past couple of weeks for EnergizeIT. Two weeks ago, we were in Kelowna and Victoria, last week we were in London and Kitchener/Waterloo and this week, we’ll be in Fredericton and Moncton. We’re “Team Rover”, one of three teams visiting 20 cities, large and small, across Canada, with John Bristowe and Rodney Buike making up “Team West” and Christian Beauclair and Rick Claus comprising “Team East”.

EnergizeIT’s main presentations are about what’s possible with the Microsoft platform, with a focus on those parts that lots of people use to help them get work done and make their businesses go: Visual Studio 2010, Azure, SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. In those presentations, we’re demoing these tools and technologies in action with live code and live data, and yes, we’re promoting Microsoft stuff.

In addition to the main presentations, we’ve been doing academic visits, which are quite different. They’re about helping students make the transition from school to the working world. In these presentations, I make very little mention of Microsoft, leaving it just to:

  • Hey, I work for Microsoft!
  • A quick story about how I landed my job at Microsoft
  • At the very end, I point them to a couple of sites:

The academic presentation focuses on the sorts of things that one should do to have a career in technology that’s rewarding in every sense of the word. The core message is that you, the student about to enter the working world, are in charge of your own future, and that in this industry and time, there’s a lot you can do to shape it.

Each of the teams has been working from a presentation created by Qixing Zheng, who used to be with the Microsoft Canada Developer Evangelism team and has since gone on to join the Windows User Experience group, but we’ve been pretty free to add our own twists to it. Our team’s version features a lot of interesting stuff, including:

  • The story of my first client meeting, which was a disaster
  • The importance of an online presence of some sort
  • How to get experience when you’re not yet in the working world
  • The value of “soft skills”
  • Why operating on just your “left brain” isn’t going cut it anymore
  • Ideas from a number of books, including:

So far, Damir and I have done presentations at:

and we’re going to present next week here in Toronto at:

I’d love to do these visits to universities as well as colleges, but the EnergizeIT tour takes place just as universities are going into final exams. I hope that TechDays, which happens from September through December (fall semester in universities) gives us a chance to present at universities across Canada, including my beloved alma mater, Queen’s.

I enjoy doing presentations of all sorts, but I have to admit that there’s a special place in my heart for presenting to students. It’s partly because students are a fun crowd to present to, and partly because there’s the notion of me – of all people, given my checkered academic history – standing at a college or university lectern, presenting ideas to students is rather funny. I love doing the academic visits, and I still have trouble believing that I’m getting paid to do something that’s this much fun.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Geek It Happened to Me Play Work

Developer Junior: Creating Your Own Games with Kodu

My tech show for kids, Developer Junior, premieres today on Butterscotch.com! In this episode, Junior (the puppet) and I (the human) take a look at the Kodu game builder system and go through a quick tutorial:

Developer Junior is a show on Butterscotch.com aimed at the younger set and is all about helping kids make the most out of the technology in their everyday lives. It’s about writing programs, creating media, playing games, and having fun with technology. (It’s also a dream come true for me – I always thought I’d be a great host for a kid’s show.)

There’s another episode coming up, in which Junior and I walk through the process of making a movie using Live Movie Maker. Watch for it!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Geek It Happened to Me Work

Visiting Victoria

Victoria, Day 1

The day after Damir and I did our EnergizeIT presentation in Kelowna, it was time to go to our next destination, Victoria, by way of Vancouver.

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The Vancouver-to-Victoria flight is so short that you spend almost as much time taxiing as you do in the air. The actual flying time is 15 minutes, while the gate-to-gate time is just under half an hour (if you’ve ever done flown from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, this flight is similar). It’s short enough that it’s done using a Bombardier Dash 8, which is essentially a bus with turboprop engines and wings, right down to the bench-style seat at the back of the plane. If you peek into the seam in the wall behind the last row, you can see the ground crew loading the luggage into the cargo area.

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The Dash 8 has tiny overhead bins; they’re so small that my travel accordion won’t fit in them. This required reversing my normal carry-on approach: my laptop bag went overhead, while the accordion went under the seat in front of me:

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Victoria’s got a nice airport. I wish more airport waiting areas had trees in them:

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The trip from Victoria’s airport to downtown Victoria takes twice as long as the flight in from Vancouver. We were fortunate to get a lift into town from Ron Demedash from the local Microsoft user group. Thanks, Ron!

One of the perks of being a Microsoft employee with a lot of travel in your schedule is that we have a deal with Fairmont hotels. Fairmont buildings are often a nice change from Mies van der Rohe-esque filing-cabinets-in-the-sky, tending to be grand old-school ones like Toronto’s Royal York, Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier, Calgary’s Palliser and Victoria’s Empress, pictured below. Better still, their service is excellent.

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We settled into the hotel, and later that evening, Ron picked us up and took us to rabbit-rich University of Victoria. We did our EnergizeIT presentation – two hours and forty-five minutes of pure actual-working-code-and-infrastructure demo with no slides until the very, very end – in the Engineering and Computer Science building. The room was packed; Ron had to bring in extra chairs to seat people at the back.

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We handed out the usual raffle prizes at the end of the presentation with a special bonus prize provided by Ron: a budget tablet computer, with four built-in apps. The icons on the tablet are easy to read, and the screen is readable even in bright sunlight. To sweeten the deal, we threw in a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate:

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On our way in, we noticed that the elevator featured something that looked like a button labelled “EARTHQUAKE”.

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A quick check confirmed that it was not a button that took you to a penthouse club or restaurant named “Earthquake”, nor was it a button that summoned seismic activity:

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I assume it lights up in the event of an earthquake, which I also assume is a warning to the elevator’s passengers to get out. Does anyone know if such elevators have other built-in safety features, such as stopping on the nearest floor in the event of a quake?

Victoria, Day 2

Damir flew back to Vancouver to do an academic presentation at Douglas College, while I stayed in Victoria to do an academic presentation at Camosun College’s Interurban campus. I didn’t get a picture of my academic audience, but did get a shot of this ad for Camosun later that night in downtown Victoria:

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The academic presentations are part of the EnergizeIT tour – we do them at colleges close to the place where we’re doing the main EnergizeIT sessions. Unlike the main session, where we talk about what’s possible with the Microsoft-based platform, the academic session is all about helping students make the transition to the working world and plan their careers in high-tech. Unlike the main EnergizeIT session, which is a Microsoft-technology-specific “do these things in the right order or the demo doesn’t work” affair for working techies, the academic presentation is conversational, not specific to any tool or technology, and has plenty of room for dialogue with the audience.

The Trip Home

The next day, I went back to Victoria’s airport…

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Back on the Dash 8:

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Here’s the obligatory “art shot”. Propellers are great photo subjects:

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And half an hour later, I was in Vancouver’s airport. (Memo to Toronto’s Pearson airport: would it kill you to offer free wifi?)

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…and a few hours later, I landed back at home.

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Coming up this week: Damir and I hit the road and drive to our EnergizeIT presentations in London and Kitchener.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.