July 22, 2010 AutoMapper, DevMeeting, Presentation, Success 12 comments
Developer’s Meeting: AutoMapper
Today I performed developer’s meeting on AutoMapper. I would say that it went good, but I did not really enjoy it and will explain why. But I do not regret doing this presentation and will explain why.
Why am I upset of today’s presentation delivery?
Not so many people got interested in theme, that I’ve decided to present. There were about 10 or less developers in conference room. I really expected to have bigger audience and had prepared to speak to other division of our software business unit. But I believe there are some reasons why I did not get many listeners.
Few important thoughts for presenters that encounter the same
Never be disappointed by the number of attendees.. at least at the beginning, so this will not decrease quiality of your speach.
If topic of you speech is not really popular it doesn’t mean that you should discount its value.
If topic is indeed simple don’t neglect your preparations. For some reason I even wasn’t a bit nervous before presentation, as I’m usually are and I don’t find this to be good.
Take a look around, you probably will see those who are interested in topic and those who are simply excited by your presentations. Special thank to today’s attendees, without you I would have to talk to walls.
For future pay more attention on actuality and popularity of the topic. I personally going to create monkeysurvey to get that information.
With smaller audience you get more feedbacks. Why? Easily, they feel more relaxed and you have more time to allocate to each of them. In today’s presenation I got so many interesting questions and figured them out for myself and for audience online, while writing code. That was amazing.
Try to understand those who did not participate. Probably they counted to be more reasonable to spend that hour on some urgent issues or they discounted topic, since they are sure that will not need AutoMapper. And if they even will need it, it is quite possible to learn it in amount of couple of hours.
Still be proud of yourself. This is must be, otherwise you will lose confidence which costs a lot.
Presentation
For my presentation I’ve used already existing posts on AutoMapper, also for the end of presentation I had real world usage examples.
And here is presentation itself:
View more presentations from Andriy Buday.
Don’t forget to check out my article on AutoMapper here.
My 100-th blog post: Blogging Pays Off
July 3, 2010 Success No comments
Hello my Dear Readers, this post is my 100-th blog post.
Almost 9 months past since I’ve posted my first words here. I went through different topics here. Starting with design patterns and different educational stuff (my master year), and finishing with different book reviews and tips on how to become successful.
But why do I need blog?
First of all I love blogging. It helps me feel that I’m needed in this world and that I bring something valuable to others. Also it takes me closer to my life goals. One of those is to become successful world known developer. And even if I’ll switch to some managing position in the future I will still be developer of my and people’s around lives.
Blogging keeps me concentrated on different topics I write about, helping me understand them better. I would bet that most of the software developers think that they know Gof design patterns, but when you ask them about main concepts they could list only obvious. Ask them to perform research over internet and create own example and bright understanding will come to their mind. Same things happen to me. It is just amazing how something could be clear after you wrote a blog post about it.
Sometimes I’ve been posting short quick tips. They could look useless, but when I come to the same problem I just go to my blog and see the solution. It happened to me few times, and I was really proud that I have this blog.
Blogging helps me stand out. My colleagues see that I do the best to keep in touch with new technologies and that I’m trying to self-improve. Sometimes it makes me sad when I see others being much more proactive and productive, as Scott Hanselman (blogging god?). I’m afraid that I could make someone upset because of my mood. On the other hand when I see those active people it drives me to become super active. I hope I help my coworkers in their passion to became famous.
Blogging increases my visibility. I’ve been asked few times for meetings outside of my company. Once it was about creating user group, finally it was created without me, but now I’m with those guys, doing some presentations for the best .NET UG in Ukraine ;). Few other times it were job opportunities but I did not leave my company, hope it was the right decision.
Finally, blogging pays off! Week ago I had performance appraisal and besides of my usual capabilities like result orientation and knowledge, my blog played evident role in how that meeting went. Now I have possibility to be Senior Developer in my company with higher salary, I hope :). But remember that it is not just your blog (aka. public visibility) to lead you to success. It is your hard work and attitude to things you do!
Be directed to your goal and move forward!
[2013-11-21 EDIT: some language corrections]
Book Review: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
July 2, 2010 Book Reviews, Success No comments
Last weekend I had a chance to read very interesting book, kind of business novel. I was given this book by my managers after we finished with my performance appraisal. Which (btw) went very well.
Book talks about guy, who manages plant where he encounter problem of going behind the schedule and his bosses wanted to close out his plant. But he with colleges, using Theory of Constraints and sophisticated thinking, was able to get plant to the new level.
From first pages I was not sure if book is kind of my thing, since I usually don’t read novels, but it turns out that book is only a bit hard going at the beginning. From page to page it was more gripping to read and in the end it just became a real page-turner.
Book forces us to think that everything is possible, you just need to take a look for wider solutions without using any of your stereotypes. Book never gives you ready answers, so it is thought-provoking one. First it states the problem, describing it in details, after that main hero is bombarded with different questions by friends, which provoke us think in pair with him.
Reading book was really-really enjoyable and I would highly recommend it for your reading. Book indeed is exciting for those who are interested in career development and in manager’s positions.
P.S. I’ve changed this post a bit to use more specific words like: interesting, exciting, thought-provoking, a real page-turner, gripping, kind of my thing, hard going at the beginning, gripping. That was English course activity to have review on some book. I’m lazy to write new one.
Law Of Success: book review
May 14, 2010 Book Reviews, Success No comments
Today I finished listening to another book on success. It is called “The Law Of Success” by Napoleon Hill. Book is represented in 16 lessons.
I think that it worth to read or listen to this book. It shows up lot of different tips that you can use to achieve your strongly defined and be biggest goal of your life. I know that most of books on success talk about main goal of your life, but this one I think is the strongest on this requirement.
So it says that you need to define for yourself goal of your life, and… what is more interested… you should keep repeating its formulation every day few times. Hill just refers to autosuggestion as one of the key concepts on getting your results.
Honestly yesterday I tried to repeat for myself that I will wake up 2 hours early than I usually do, and it did not help… sad. Today I will have another try. So “I will wake up at 8! I will wake up at 8! I will wake up at 8! I will wake up at 8! I will wake up at 8! I will wake up at 8! I will wake up at 8! I will wake up at 8! I will wake up at 8! I will wake up at 8 regardless of Saturday! I will wake up at 8am! I will wake up at 8! I will wake up at 8 and will be able to do what I have planned! I will wake up at 8! Guys, I will wake up at 8! I will wake at 8am! I will really wake up at 8am! I’m going to wake up at 8 o’clock tomorrow! I will wake up at 8 am! I will do that! I will wake up at 8! I will wake up at 8!”
Ok, I did what he asked, now I will see if it will really help me, and will share with you :)
Book review: How to Win Friends and Influence People
May 1, 2010 Book Reviews, Success 2 comments
I just listened to one very interesting audio book. Book title is “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. And I think that it worth to read, or listen to it as I did, because it teaches you how to interact with others. If you are going to grow in your career you indeed need such stuff to know.
This book is of psychological type and author (Dale Carnegie) is talking about interaction with other people. Mainly it talks about how to correctly behave when you want someone to be on your side.
Book could be very useful for managers and for people in their lives. For developer it could be useful in future when you are going to drive few people in your team. If you just starting as a senior developer you already should have some experience driving junior stuff. When you are Technical Leader you need to drive whole team, you need to establish correct processes in your team and one of the hardest tasks in all of this is to make others work on tasks you assign them in the way that they will want to work on that.
Sometimes there are situations when you see somebody’s mistakes and there should be a way to show them this, but at the same time not make them your enemies – they should look at you as at friend, who wants to help.
Book has a lot of different examples from real life when you convince others to do what you want, but for them it looks like they really want to do it, because it seems useful for them.
There are a lot of rules in book. You could go and see contents of the book.
Go to this wiki page to see main points of book. (I recommend).
But now I will try to list down what I remember:
- Honor others for the smallest they did.
- Show that they are valuable – all people indeed what to be valuable.
- Start conversation with what people want and make them answering with “YES” on your questions, only then you could give bad news.
- Smile to others but don’t bluff.
- Build reputation for mentees in eyes of others. So your mentee will do everything he could in order to prove what you said about him.
- Really think about how to walk in his/her shoes.
I know that you heard about that a hundred times. But when you will spent 10,5 hours on listening to this book and when author talks about this during all the time. This will ensure that you remember it and probably will force you to try it in real life. You could start with your team members or with you wife. I think that I will try with my girl just today… or even before I will meet her, since I’m now disconnected from internet and typing this in bus road to Lviv. So will be able post this in evening.
I would recommend this book if you have time for such things or if you could get audio version as I did.
P.S. I tried today some tips from book – it works! You should try.
Exam 70-536: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework – Application Development Foundation – PASSED
April 30, 2010 Certification, Success No comments
Why would I need to pass that exam at all?
There are many arguments to pass the exam. Most of them are simple bureaucracy. First of all, your resume will have additional strength if you will add few certification records on the bottom. Secondly, many companies are interested to have their employees to be certified, or maybe they want to make you promotion road more hard :) so to allow you to be promoted you need to pass some set of certificates and cope with lot of other requirements. At least this is situation which I have in my company.
Why would I need this exam for my blog?
Very easy: when YOU are on my blog first time, you read something and create your thought on topic you just read and then you decide to subscribe or not to subscribe. Question is following: what is guarantor that it worth to subscribe to my blog? And answer is “Nothing”. But what will be your reaction if you will see MVP logo at the top-right of my blog? Are my chances better? Or course they are.
Why else would I need this exam?
Following point is very important but honestly I could not put it above (I will describe why). The point is to enhance you knowledge and learn something new. Of course during preparation to exam you read some books and search over MSDN on topics you are interested and which will be measured. But in real life you could be experienced .NET developer and still have difficulties to pass exam. In other words I have doubts if 10 years experienced developer could pass exam without at least some special preparation to it.
What else did I miss?
Of course – self-confidence. In order to be successful you need to feel yourself confident in things you do. In order to grow you should have something behind you, that could you help stand when you are with people who have certificates. And plus to that it is always very enjoyable to know that you know more then others. But a secret: do not show them that. It is very important. Do not praise yourself, let others do it instead.
How to prepare and how did I prepare?
You could find a lot of very interesting posts over internet on how to prepare.
I like this one:
http://lukecummins.me.uk/2009/08/70-536-my-tips-for-this-microsoft-exam/
I even found other blogs that are about certification.
My recommendation number 1: google on how to prepare… and you will find a lot of interesting stuff.
Also while you are trying some demo tests on MeasureUp or tests from TrainingKit and if you are not confident about answer do not try to remember it – go and figure answer in depth!
Also I wrote some tips on how to read TrainingKit. At least this works for me:
- Read accurately but quick if theme is familiar to you.Skip “Real
Word” and pay attention on “Important” and “Exam Tip”, try to remember
it! - If there are boring explanation and then code, switch first to code
and analyze if you understand everything there, and if that is true,
don’t return back to text. - Do not execute Labs unless you do not understand what you had read.
- If there are difficult chapters try to read them twice – I did this
with Application Security.
How was it?
Night before exam I felt confident about exam, but was still worrying.. so I was preparing till 3am. In the morning I came to work as usual and did few things… reviewed ones code, checked e-mails… expressed my thoughts on demo we should have today and wrote e-mail to team members that I will be out for about 2 hours. My company is Microsoft’s parner so I do not need to move to other location – just get down 5 floors.
First couple of questions I was nervous, but then I felt that I’m confident with most of questions. I marked only 2 out of 40 for additional review. When I finished I got message saying that I PASSED EXAM with score 907. This means that I answered incorrectly for about 4 questions. I think that this is very good result.
Picture which I get is like following:
My next target is probably 70-505. Passing it is point of honour, because I already failed it twice because of overflow of confidence.
Also as I’m active in preparing developers meeting for developers from my project and I’m thinking to teach our developers in order to get certification – covering some areas from exam.
Express your thoughts on passing this exam.
Brainbench Master Certification in C#
April 27, 2010 Certification, Success 8 comments
It turns out that I’m eligible to pass exam 70-536 for free – my company will pay for me, but before I’m required to pass Brainbench C# exam with higher than 4.0 score.
And I just did it – my score is 4.03.
You could see my results using following link: http://www.brainbench.com/transcript.jsp?pid=9108054
So now I could use this logo on my blog (see somewhere on the right):
Also in e-mail which I got is following information:
| You are eligible for a certificate! Would you like to receive it? | ||||||
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How do you think should I pay for that? Please let me know.
Also following information says that I have weak areas in implementing Services and Data Consumers. Need to check-out in more details about that.
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Guys, it is quite easy to pass this. And don’t loose chance, this exam is free till 30 April.
It is time to get Microsoft Certification
April 26, 2010 Certification, Success 4 comments
When is it time to be Microsoft Certified?
My company is developing new certification model, named abc (I’m not sure if I can use original name), which includes few levels such as abc Certified Junior, abc Certified Intermediate, abc Certified Senior… and so on… To become Senior developer after you are Intermediate you first need to get abc Intermediate certification.
Each of the levels has some requirements like industry experience, some number company-wide presentations, passed performance appraisal with strength area marks, passed knowledge evaluation, but what is important here is that each next level also requires some external certifications. For example, to be abc certified intermediate level in .NET desktop you need to have 2 certificates: 70-505 and 70-536.
Hey, but I’m already promoted to be intermediate, but do not have certificates… At least it is one of the reasons why I cannot become Senior (another one is that I need about half a year more experience and improve my knowledge). And this makes me bit sad.
Actually I tried to get 70-505 exam immediately after I get promoted (summer 2009). First time it was free attempt, and I failed it. Shit, but that was so easy, I got 670 out of 1000 with required 700.
Why did I fail it? There are few reasons:
* Exam 70-505 includes features from the 3.0 framework, which I did not ever use. For example it includes easy question regarding the Linq. I did not know Linq at that moment. It included question regarding installing and deploying strategies. Which I did not ever try. Stop. Am I so bad? I knew design patterns; I had experience in developing desktop applications. But I was interacted only with actual developing of easy things; I was not familiar with whole lifecycle of our product. To be honest we have so complicated lifecycle that nobody knows it well.
* I was too much self-confident about the exam.
* I did not spend a lot of time on preparing, maybe half a day.
I know that there are other ways to successfully pass exam, I think you know what I mean, but I did not see in internet actual tests for my exam, and besides that is not good way to pass it. I saw some people that passed with 1000 score other exams. Why? They found exact test in internet.
Let’s suppose that I was not ready and I did not know how to pass such exams.
Ok. Do you know Roosevelt? His words: “Never, never, never, never…give up!” And I did not give up. I tried again with the same exam month later. And you know – I field it with score less than 500. I was pure sure that questions will be similar, and they were. I was too much confident that I will pass it, but I did not. So I blew 50$. Holly shit.
Was it needed to pass Microsoft exam? Tips are following:
• Get resource to learn from it. Best choice is Microsoft Training Kits.
• Be aware what does your exam include, if there are some unknown technologies for you, ask yourself if this is correct exam for you.
• Ensure that you interacted with each technology meant there in real world, if you have not interact, just write simple applications when preparing to exam.
• Do not schedule exam, if you are not self-confident in your knowledge.
• Do not be too much self-confident in your knowledge. Most of exams are dry tests, which include some monkey questions that could be easily forgotten.
• Train, train, train… and never give up.
Getting MCTS for me is very important step in my career. (See picture below).
I’m going to achieve this with passing 536 and 505 in short terms.
My presentation on the Service Oriented Architecture
April 23, 2010 Opinion, SOA, Success 4 comments
Yesterday I executed my presentation on the Service Oriented Architecture. It was awesome. I got good portion of emotions.
People
I was really surprised how many people have come to listen to me. As per me it was supposed that this local Architecture Group (AG) is for couple of people, who have desire to spend their free time on talking about SOA, but for my great surprise almost all team came, I mean developers from whole enterprise project where I work. Guys, there should be something that I don’t know about intent of this group?
Rehearsal
Before presentation I as usual did my rehearsal. First it was presenting to my friend, who is also developer. We call this ‘Turbulent Developers Community‘ where we sit in the evening with beer and talk about different interesting IT things. So he brought few interesting questions for which I was now ready to respond. Also, I had my *.ppt at my phone, so when getting to my work I was trying to replay presentation in my mind. І на останок, вже безпосередньо перед презентацією я розказав її своїй дівчині в скороченому режимі – це зайняло близько 20 хвилин. Дуже тобі дякую за це!
Presentation
So, I started with plan which I have in this blog post. People were listening with attention and that is very appreciating. Also, what was enjoyable is that they had a lot of different comments on what about I was talking. They even spoke to 3 of my slides instead of my… OMG.
How was it?
… asked I, and got an answer: “It’s a great success! … can we now get money out of that?.. :)”. Those are words of my colleague with whom I work on the same piece of software. I really hope that other also enjoyed what I did.
Conclusion
For myself I have discovered that I learnt more about how to provide a good presentation. I do not say that this is my best presentation. I this the best I had is presentation on DDD, but anyway… having more experience in that area is very good achievement.
Keep in mind – you will die someday
What is the intent of my life? I spend my life at work, so that is a very big part of it. If above said it truth, why don’t then do the best at work and in your growth? For me it is mandatory. If you don’t like you work – just change it. Just do it!
Everyone have to die some day. Think about what you do and what you want to achieve. Have super large dreams. Often why I’m getting to the work at town vehicle many people talks and as I understand the intent of their life it to find a good job, to have a car, home and family. I don’t say that family is bad, BUT why to put such trivial task in front of you? You have one life and then death!
Am I still on track?
March 3, 2010 Revision of my activity, Success No comments
I just want to ask my self if I’m still on the track. Accordingly to my 7th point in the list of “Things you need to remember to become successful developer” I need to have revision of what I’m doing.
This is year list:
1. Get MCTS, MCPD.
I’m out. Why? Because I was to lazy to schedule exam and learn something. I do not think that MCTS could be big problem for me. Just need week for learning.
2. Read 24 book.
I’m on. Read 3 books in 2 months… almost as desired.
3. Become known employee in my company.
I’m on and out. I did few presentations, but I think that need more. Will try to get something tomorrow.
4. Familiarize with Java and contribute research and development work to Kohonen Map.
I’m on regarding of Java – wrote few GoF patterns on it.
I’m on regarding of Java – wrote few GoF patterns on it.
I’m off the Kohonen Maps – will fix this.
5. Become Senior Developer
I’m on.
6. Improve English.
I’m on. Joining English courses.
7. Gather good capital and look for investments.
I’m still on (before marriage :) ) 1/3 of what I need for month are income like interest, and that is very good.
This is keep doing list:
1. Keep on learning.
I’m on.
2. Establish what your goal is
I’m on.
3. Every challenge is opportunity
I’m on and off.
4. Be positively charged
Getting better with this.
5. Find a mentor.
I have such.
6. Be more public
Search google me, hope will get more than 700 results.
7. Do you gym
I’m completely out. I need fix this 100%, either I’ll be dead before get to the goal.
