December 4, 2011 Conferences, NHibernate, Presentation, Success 2 comments
My talk at #kievaltnet about NHibernate internals
Friday I’ve been in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. At the beginning of the day me with my wife visited couple of shops to buy some special things my wife makes. And than we went to have a good sit in small restaurant till 7 PM. I had to finish up my presentation…
Recently I’ve mentioned that I will be speaking at Kiev ALT.NET. So this post is about it.
Kiev ALT.NET
Kiev ALT.NET is great group of smart people willing to learn interesting things in .net but maybe from deeper standpoint than standard .net user groups do. I’ve been having good conversations in twitter with @chaliy and once we met at UnetaPlus in Kharkiv where he invited me as speaker to the @kievaltnet. Peliminary we agreed on something about NHibernate.
The topic
I knew that I have to prepare something interesting on NHibernate. But what? There are dozen of articles on it, there are many videos available. Topic just came itself. You might know that I’ve been working with NH for long time already and that I’ve written something similar to ORM so I decided that getting some insight into NHibernate’s guts would be really interesting.
Presentation delivery
So before 7 PM I got to the Ciklum office (building on the left). Landscapes from the 20th floor are astonishing, especially at night.
Not sure if I was enough prepared, but at least I felt that guys were listening to me very-very attentively. Some of them twitted simultaneously (@alexbeletsky, @skalinets, @korneliuk) and had good laugh. At least I invented term “swiss breakpoint” (aka. conditional breakpoint with cross).
Also I tried to joke much, but it didn’t go as well as I expected it to, guess because of sleepless night and general tiredness. Also I spoke with accent (as per them o_O. Never thought I have any kind of accent of my native language).
Presentation itself
View more presentations from Andriy Buday.
I would like to thank all guys, who came to listen to me and other presenters. Thanks for having me at Kiev ALT.NET. It had been great time and I would like to be there once again despite reason (to speak or to listen).
Hackathon “WP7 Rocks!” – we won
November 1, 2011 Success, WP7 6 comments
I would like to share some of my experience and impressions of taking part in “Windows Phone 7 Rocks!” Hackathon in Lviv.
An amazing event
First of all, many thanks to the organizers of this event and to the sponsors. Event was really great. Everyone got presents, food and joy of playing kinect at free time and of course tons of intensive coding. Hackathon started with helpful and resourceful presentations delivered by organizers. Two of them were about stuff I think wp7 developer must know – metro design and publishing to marketplace. And I would like to correct myself by replacing “developer” with “Ukrainian developer”, thing is, it is not easy for my country to be appreciated by Microsoft. Other two were about working with data in Mango and augmented reality. Ah.. and forgot to mention that everyone got styling wp7 t-shirt, finally I’ve got one! Awesome!
Hackathon is programming, team, fun and creativity
I hardly remember any other day when I had such intensive programming time. Not to say that I didn’t have sleepless all-night coding, but I was somewhat relaxed, making tea time to time surfing internet when realizing that copy-paste is no longer working. It was different, it was team play.
As you may know at the moment I work on enterprise WP7 project and my team has 8 developers. 6 of us took part in the Hackathon which formed 2 Hackathon teams. I cannot express well enough how much this night made us more closer to each other and how extreme team-building it was. But I strongly ensure you that it worth each minute we spent together coding two great ideas to be presented next day. During the night we did 125 commits to the source-control (4:59PM first commit and 11:22AM last commit). Can you imagine such productivity of the hired people? Never. Of course no one can work such intensive for long time.
So here we are:
6 most closest people. Sorry for two of them not looking at you and for me also – I’m busy.
On Monday our scrum master sent congratulation to us and here is how it looks like:
Hold on for a second. Winners? Yeap! But wait for a second. First things first.
Applications developed
At the moment there are no presentations available in the internet or video, so I cannot say much about other teams. Hopefully I will update this blog post soon. But I can remember many great applications developed by others, such as handy cartoon-creator, quest generator and player, travel places logger, guitar tuner, ball game, and many other nice applications. 3 of us created “real-problem” solving application – “WC Emergency”, which by it’s idea exploded auditory: when you really have “need”, you start app and answer 2 basic questions “How long can you wait?” and “How fast can you run?” after which you get the most reachable WC. Some other team even managed to create 3D game, to the last moment I thought they will take first place. For the complexity they probably deserve first place, but…
Winners!
We managed to create something more exciting. We invented pure FUN. So other 3 of us created mini-game “Face 2 Face”. Splashscreen below:
After which you get selection for the single player or multiplayer mode:
For the single player you can play with blue-red balls or can load images instead of blue or read ones. Here single player simple mode:
Idea is simple – you keep friends on the battle-field and throw enemies out of it. Physics for two-kinds is different, I will keep it in secret.
But joy begins whey you selected multiplayer, took pictures for your team (faces cropped) here:
Found other guy willing to play with you. He takes pictures for his team on his phone (!). Game starts and you both have all pictures. You throw his guys and keep yours, he does the same for his team.
That angry bomb also has something to do with the game, but it is secret.
I think me and Taras managed to impress people when we started taking photos of them and playing with those in front of the auditory. Great that we had server-side coverage by Roman.
I bet this gave us new emotions and inspiration for the future. We also got HTC Mozart phone as present.
Thanks
Everyone was really pleased and despite those sleepless-red-eye-faces it was clearly seen that no one was disappointed of spending 24h non-stop coding.
Mine time management = pomodoro + outlook + notepad + paper
June 22, 2011 Success 6 comments
Have you ever read any books on time management? I’m sure you read maybe few of them or at least read articles/blogs and of course heard a lot. Have you ever tried some time management techniques? I’m sure you tried. Have you ever failed in those tries? I guess you did. And if you did not fail, than you are probably very lucky person. I believe I have an answer why those fail, or at least failed for me. Reason is – none of particular techniques that I tried really matched my personality and my style of work. There are things that simply cannot work for you. That’s it.
So what do I recommend to make it happen?
Play more and more with different (!) techniques, think about them, think why they work and don’t work for you. Also try to mix them. Try to adapt what you learnt more and never be precise to what is written in the book.
And here is what I think works for me
Paper notebooks
I have two paper notebooks. One I always have with myself when I’m outside of the work and another is always at work. I never forget working one at home and vice-versa.
Work-notebook. Usually I write to this notebook as I go. Anything could go there – meeting minutes, my thoughts, items to work on, even some bad words if I’m not satisfied with meeting I’m attending. I would have used laptop instead, but I’m not at position/company where guys have laptops for work.
Personal-notebook. Is something where everything goes planned per each day. For example I can put there to have haircut on Friday. But I also like to list there items for the next day that are related to work, grouped by need in them. Something like “must”, “nice”, ”awesome” so in the end of the day when I take a look at it and I did everything from “must” section I’m already satisfied with my day and if I did something from “nice” or “awesome” I’m proud of myself.
Plan Of Attack
I have txt file located at my working desktop called “Plan of Attack.txt”. It is very similar to what you would have called “todo.txt”, but except of writing there things I need to work on, I also put anything that could come into my mind while working on something else. For example while I was working on coding stuff X, I realized that I need to send short e-mail to customer on feature Y. Even if this e-mail could be short, instead of writing it immediately I do my “Alt+Tab” and document “e-mail on Y”, which is probably one second to do. By this process I did not lose my concentration on stuff X and I avoided stress for my memory to remember about that Y.
Outlook
I utilize Outlook very much for planning stuff for the day along with applying “pomodoro” technique. This is also very interesting that I have 15-30 minutes appointments in outlook that look like “Plan of attach and e-mails”. During that time I work on my inbox and I also reorganize what I have in my magic file by simply changing order items are located in file. Those at the top have higher priority. Once I sent e-mail on Y appropriate line disappears from my list.
Pomodoro technique
I try to stay maximum focused on things I do, and this is very much propagated by pomodoro technique. My outlook has 30 minutes personal appointments, I mark them as “free time”, so it shows people that they anyway can schedule meeting with me at that point of time. Also if I have to much external interruption (e.i. guys asking questions) I put a note at the paper near me with label “I’m available starting from xx:xx”. So during 25 minutes I just do my job, say “Pomodoro: Coding – Security” or “Pomodoro: E-mails”, very focused. Here is also one important note: I do not use this technique if I feel that I’m concentrated at work and have no issues with continuing what I do. I can continuously work on coding something during 2 hours and still be focused. I do not interrupt myself by these “tomatoes” if such things happen (usually at night).
Free time which is never free
I also have free spots, of course they are always occupied by something I need to help on, on short conversations with others and many other things that steal our time. But there is pros. in free spots – I can spend it on my further planning and I can go through my scribbles in notebooks and… I have time to relax.
Spend time wisely
When someone cannot be in time with task they do there are doubts if they spend their time wisely. Having this doubt can be fair and can be not. People always have different vision on what is important for other people and what is definition of “done”. Doesn’t matter how much stuff you’ve done and will do, please always know why you do everything in your life.
Key things to the whole damn time management:
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Every thought or task is documented, so your mind if free to do what it is intended to do at the moment
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Have time to reorganize tasks and plan them
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Be maximum focused on tasks you do at the moment
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Have time to relax and think about things you do and will do in future
Thank you very much for reading this blog post, looking forward to hear feedbacks from you.
I’m MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer 3.5
February 18, 2011 Certification, Success 3 comments
So far so good, I passed everything I planned to pass for the next 1.5 years. Take a look at the picture in career plan for software engineer blog post. I guess that I probably was afraid about learning ASP.NET. And as I passed everything sooner I can plan for more cool stuff, for instance starting my own small project or spend more time on personal life.
But here is just a little bit more on exam itself. I was ready for this exam not because of some books, training kits or anything else. It is all my experience. I extremely enjoyed passing this exam, you just apply your experience and common sense if you have it in software development of enterprise applications. Exam measures my understanding of designing application, its components, their testing, stabilizing, deployment, also choosing appropriate technologies. That is what I encounter often at work.
This is good plus to my CV and promotion strategy.
Exam 70-565: PRO: Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications Using the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
I passed 70-565 exam with score 971 out of 1000. And this time exam questions just flattered to me. I liked them much. I believe that this is because they are not kind of questions where you have to know exact method signature. These are questions where you have to think and choose appropriate decision, and even more, they overlap a lot with questions I encountered in my experience.
You can see my transcript using this information:
https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx
Transcript ID: 904316
Access Code: andriybuday
Nearest certification plans
There is still one thing left. It is 4.0 .NET framework outside, not 3.5 so I’m looking for upgrade of the current certification. The best matching exam would be transition of my skills to MCPD 4.0 Windows Developer (70-521). At the moment I don’t have exact date for this exam, but it might be in 2-4 weeks.
Book Review: “3.5–ADO.NET Training Kit” and passing 70-561 exam
February 10, 2011 Book Reviews, Certification, Success No comments
Training Kit
So I finally finished reading training kit for ADO.NET exam. It is easy to read book with many topics that you probably know or at least heard about if you are using .NET. But besides of standard topics on DataSets, Data Querying, LINQ there are few that represent much more interest at least for me. For me these are chapters about Synchronization Framework, Entity Framework and Data Services (REST). I read them with great pleasure. But unfortunately in book they are covered briefly. Also Data Services are not even included into exam questions. I would also say that unless you are going to pass 561 exam, don’t read this training kit, better find some good tutorials on each of the themes, use MSDN and try everything out.Exam 70-561: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, ADO.NET Application Development
I passed 70-561 exam with score 700 out of 1000 with needed 700 for passing. Yeah, that is damn near to failure. But what is also interest that the more I fill overconfident about the exam the worse score I get. Maybe that is why I failed WinForms for the first time, but passed ASP. Who knows.. This rule probably doesn’t apply to WCF exam. I was confident about it and passed with high score.
You can see my transcript using this information:
https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx
Transcript ID: 904316
Access Code: andriybuday
Nearest certification plans
My current certification situation is as following:
So I’m very close to my certification goal which is “MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer 3.5” and I already scheduled 565 exam for Friday Feb 18. As for preparation I really hope that couple of years of experience in Enterprise project are in help for me. Also I pick up “Microsoft Application Architecture Guide” for my reading. I read about first 30 pages and I’m impressed by this book. It is real glue. I like very much things that I read from very first pages. Will see how it goes and be ready for review next week. I believe it will be more comprehensive, since this is not kind of training kit book.
Woot! That have happened–I’m done with English courses
January 26, 2011 English, Success 4 comments
I attended English courses in my company for about 9 months. For this time I learnt a lot of new stuff, and revisited whole bunch of grammar. Also I slightly increased my vocabulary.
I’ve mentioned many times that English courses are very important for outsourcing company and for me particularly. I even described one of the lessons and recommended some activities to do to learn English.
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I’ve finished courses with final test result of 92%.
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My strong areas are: listening, speaking and vocabulary.
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My weak areas are: grammar, translation.
So this is very good result, but unfortunately my average score is about 80%, so I might not be eligible for next free of charge course. But honestly I do not hurry for being English course’s student for another 9 months. It makes me tired… because I have to allocate additionally 4-5 hours per week and as usual I rob it from my sleep hours. I think that the next most needed thing for me is to practice more and more. Actually I even planned to find someone who would like to talk with me in English all the time. Not my girl – she is more German expert and weak in English, and not my best friend – he is too shy or smth..
70-562: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET Application Development – PASSED
January 21, 2011 Certification, Success 8 comments
That happened! Passing this exam was the main stone on my road to MCPD Enterprise.
How did I prepare?
I already mentioned that I prepared as usual by reading training kit. But this time I did most of the Labs, because I have really little experience in Web Development.
Honestly for me ASP revealed to be very simple for understanding and easy to work with. I guess because it intersects with other technologies and also because I have more or less good dev experience in other areas.
Also I did not concentrate on learning ASP.NET extremely well. We all know that nothing with ViewState and other aspects of it are now history. ASP MVC should be technology number one for learning web, but I had to pass this exam. Also understanding what is under MVC and from what it all started is good.
Passing Exam
Exam has 45 questions for about 3 hours. I hated answering them. They were long to read and extremely boring. I HATE THIS EXAM QUESTIONS. 2 screens of question is too much, it kills.
I PASSED EXAM with score 907, woot!
You can see my transcript using this information:
https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx
Transcript ID: 904316
Access Code: andriybuday
Where Do You Want to Be In a Year?
January 8, 2011 Success, YearPlanReport 9 comments
So time for new year resolution has came.
I created similar list last year and wrote why I really think that having list of things you want to do during the year is very important. I listened to many of time management books, especially I like those recommendations that includes all aspects of the life.
Accordingly that their point of view life consists with following set of aspects: health, relations, finances, emotions, work. If at least one of this aspects lame you wouldn’t enjoy your life entirely since other aspects will suffer. I found that in recent time I neglected my health. Yeah, I’m young so I do not feel myself completely crappy, but anyway I don’t like situation in which I’m now. That is why I’m planning to have some activities in list that should help me with my health. In this country you have to work half of your life to get apartments to live in… wtf? yeah, that’s truth, so there have to be some better ways to earn more money, not only sweatshoping work. To enjoy my life it would be perfect to travel abroad with middle-low budget.
Here below is my resolution list for 2011
- Release awesome free Design Patterns book in Ukrainian (somewhen in Spring)
- Enterprise certification (finishing with 565 exam, very likely till the end of Winter)
- Learn to ski & swim well (I can both, but I want to be good at that)
- Show kick-ass performance at work (just MUST do this, I see this as key for moving forward)
- Learn WP7 and Silverlight
- Start working on some “real” book (just collecting ideas on book)
- Read 24 books (this year I will definitely hit this score)
- Travel abroad (I’m planning for Europe tourist tour)
- Marriage (yeah, this really is in the list “OMG” I’m saying to myself…)
- Learn one more programming language (probably everyone heard about learning one language per year, why not?)
- Frequent dev meetings (this is hard, because preparing takes lot of time for me)
- Karpaty alpinism (again health stuff, want to do this with my girlfriend)
- Became known presenter (couple of outside the company presentations)
- English (watch films, find guys to talk in English)
- Start coffee-and-code in Lviv
- Write couple of personal-small programming projects / contribute to open-source
- Visit one of the solid conferences
- Get money machine / some ideas / investments / whatever
- Start some business even small and crappy – but have it to learn
- Became better-and-better in planning and achieving, continue growing, etc, etc…
(list above is not ordered in any way…)
Do you have your plan for this year? If you don’t better think about it, because “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.
Ok list looks large but fair enough to achieve this in year term. Thank you for reading my resolutions and please share yours!
What has been done during last year?
January 5, 2011 Revision of my activity, Success, YearPlanReport No comments
Looking back at my “Where Do You Want to Be In a Year?” blog post for the Jan 2, 2010 I want to summarize for myself if I stand where I wanted to stand and what else could be done to improve my position. I would recommend to all of you to execute same reviewing and realize if you are moving in the right direction or not.
For the previous year I wrote 156 blog posts, read many books, performed dozen presentations, became Senior developer, passed few ms exams, decided to start my first book and did many other hopefully right things.
Remember, life is limited in time, so if you don’t move in the right direction you might waste it entirely.
So the list I had in the beginning of 2010:
By the end of 2010 I want:
1. Get Microsoft Certification:
* MCTS (Exams: 70-536 and 70-505) SUCCESS
* MCPD 70-563 and 70-565 (this one is big fish, but I need such!) FAIL
Ok, so I went very good with this item. I successfully passed 536, 505 and 503 exams, they lead me for passing exam 565, passing which credits Enterprise Application Developer 3.5 certification.
2. Read at least 24 books. 62,5% SUCCESS :) 37,5% FAIL
Ok, so counting only programming-related books I have 15 books read. You can see their reviews on my blog just follow this link.
I do not think that I’ve completely failed this item, since I have couple of books in progress and their review will reveal shortly on this blog.
3. Become known employee in my company, sharing knowledge and doing presentations, so will have much more authority among co-workers. SUCCESS
I took few good steps here. I performed company-wide presentation on Domain-Driven Design and of course I performed many so called developers meetings for my guys from my division.
I also performed 4 presentations outside of my company – two at Lviv .Net UG, one at Java UG and one at IT-Jam in Kharkiv.
Visited MS SWIT Conference in Kyiv.
4. Familiarize with Java and contribute research and development work to Kohonen Maps world. SUCCESS
By this link you can find out that I did some research on this matter and I’m almost 100% sure that I was first in the world who wrote parallelized algorithm for Kohonen maps with .net framework version 4.0. I even utilized some of the new concepts introduced regarding multithreading in .net 4.0. Along with this I spent some time writing same project with Java.
5. to be Senior Developer and continue growing… SUCCESS
Done! Read Friday 13th blog post. As of growing I slowed down slightly as per me. Maybe I got tired, but I developed my career plan.
6. Improve my English skills to have at least upper-intermediate strong level (according to my company graduating) SUCCESS
Definitely improved my English skills. My official level as of now is “upper-intermediate”. It might be that shortly will get “+strong” since my English course is not finished yet. But honestly I feel that I lack a lot to speak fluently. But now I can easily watch films without translation, listen podcasts, etc…
7. Gather good capital and looking for investments of money. SUCCESS
Ah! This progresses hardly, but I do a lot here. At least I got higher salary rate because of my promotion, but I started spending more money. I have to work on this more. Btw, my blog earned 4,81$ for the year, but we all know that it pays me differently.
Next thing I will create blog post “Where do you want to be in a Year?” for the 2011.
Till next time.
Exam 73-503: TS: Windows Communication Foundation – PASSED
November 27, 2010 Certification, Success, WCF 3 comments
I recent posts I mentioned that I read training kit for ms WCF exam. Of course I did this for some reason. I had this exam scheduled for yesterday as well as presentation on WCF for Thursday, which went extremely well. All that was scheduled because I decided to throw myself out of comfort zone. I now can ensure you that this approach indeed works. So, if you want to achieve something don’t hesitate – just go ahead and put some deadlines for yourself, and make them visible to others so this will be controlling your activity.
How did I prepare?
So I’m completely sure that positive result of this exam was guaranteed by my experience working with WCF. But anyway I read training kit, which brought many interesting aspects and some kind of hints for the exam. Third learning source (after experience and training kit) was MSDN and writing simple applications by my own. I do not like to use examples from training kit, also I found few mistakes in kit. Thursday’s presentation on WCF helped me as well, I strengthen my knowledge in transactions and instancing. Just before exam I tried MeasureUp demo test and got 6 out 6 – never got this at MeasureUp for other exams.
Passing Exam
Exam has 45 questions for 120 min. And I liked answering for them, since I faced dozen of questions related to what I do in my everyday work.
I PASSED EXAM with score 918, this means that I answered correctly on 41 questions. Woo hoo!
You can see my transcript using this information:
https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx
Transcript ID: 904316
Access Code: andriybuday
