Postcards From My Life

[UPDATE: New Slides posted, the link is below.]

Dear Reader,

Pop Quiz: How many of your developers wake up in the morning excited to work on your project? If the answer is not “all of them”, you probably need to look at how open source projects attract developers and motivate them to write code for free.

Put yourself in your developer’s shoes for a moment.
You are a professional developer, you work on a project all day at work but you live to get home and start working on your passion, an open source project. Suddenly, instead of slogging through the day, you are actively engaged in a project that may be much more complex than the one you are working on at work. Worse yet, you may actually have more responsibility, more input, more voice on your open source team than you do at work. You wish your day job excited you as much as your open source project. You wish you could be as engaged in it.

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Dear reader,

“Failing doesn’t bother me as much as failing to act does.”
– Cal Evans

It’s not a unique thought, others have written about it as well. However, this simple thought was driven home to me recently.

I got a call one day in December from a good friend of mine. He started talking about an exciting opportunity he had and that he was considering myself or one other person to help him with it. I knew deep down inside that if I did it, it would push me way out of my comfort zone. I also knew that if I did it, the project would have had a much higher ROI for my friend because I was best suited to help him promote it. Foolishly however, I passed on the opportunity giving a lame excuse because I was just too afraid to act. I failed. I failed my friend but more importantly, I failed myself.

I passed on an opportunity when I could have simply stepped up and stepped out of my comfort zone. Yes, there is a possibility I could have failed miserably. However I will never know if I could have done the job or not. I don’t regret many actions in my life, I do regret a lot of my in-actions, like this one.

As I sit here in the new year and write this, it’s not to whine or complain about a missed opportunity. I’ve learned from my mistake and moved on. This blog post is just a reminder to myself to seize opportunities that push me out of my comfort zone. Yes, I will fail at some of them. However, I’d rather be known as the guy who failed than the guy who didn’t try.

Until Next Time,

I <3 |<
=C=

Dear Reader,

After several years in the PHP Community I’ve come to realize that there are 4 major events on the PHP social calendar, tek, DPC, ZendCon and MSWDS. (Microsoft Web Development Summit) There were 3 MSWDS that took place while I was at Zend and try as I might I could not score an invite to this private party. However, last year my number came up and I was luck enough to be invited. (My thought from MSWDS08 can be found here.) While I had a good time last year, this year was an order of magnitude more interesting, fun and productive for me personally.

I met some new people

This year wasn’t just about the PHP core community, we had attendees that represented the Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress communities. I don’t think any of them were official representatives of those communities but they were developers who worked in and around those projects. It was great to meet these guys and I look forward to growing the friendships that started there.

I reconnected with old friends

There are a lot of people in the PHP community that interact with each other almost daily but we only get to see each other in person a few times a year. It was great seeing all my old friends and just hanging with them.

I was co-host this year

Those that know me well know that I’m an attention whore. I love being up in front of a crowd. So I was honored and happy this year when Karri asked me to help host the event. I got a lot more credit for the success of the event than I deserved but was happy to play my small part.

I learned a few new things

To be brief:

• Even if you don’t like installing plugins, Bing Maps makes Silverlight worth installing. It’s not a game changer but they are doing some things that Google isn’t and competition is always good.
• WebPI is continuing to grow and get better. Each time I look at this tool they have either added something new and cool or sanded down a lot of the rough edges to make it more useful.
• WordPress will run on Azure. I seriously had no idea. I can’t afford Azure just to run my blog but if they adjust the pricing a bit, this could be a serious game changer for small-time bloggers like myself.
• The more people I get to know at Microsoft, the less I’m able to despise the company. Oh sure, they patented sudo and nobody at the conference was able to do anything about those “special kind of stupid” decisions that big companies make. As long as they keep hiring people like Josh, Peter, and Karri though, it’s hard to just paint them with one big evil brush.
• Blocking irc on your “guest network” is an exercise in futility. It does no good and 30 minutes after we’ve all connected and found ways around it, we just laugh at you.

fClose()

Again, I can’t seem to say thank you enough to Karri and Tanya for all the work they did to put this summit together. Y’all were awesome hosts and we are all in your debt.

I want to say a special thanks to all the attendees. This year’s summit was great because only a few people just sat there and listened, almost everyone participated at some point. A special thanks to Keith for standing up and getting righteously pissed off because it was the right thing to do.

Most of all though, thank you Microsoft in general for asking my opinion and listening to it. Be warned though, I’m watching you. I want to see if you actually listened.

Until next time,
I <3 |<
=C=

Dear Reader,

Recently my son, who is a senior in high school, asked me the following question. (In typical Evans family tradition, it came via instant message)

This may sound weird but it’s for a bible project. I need you to answer the following question:

What three qualities do you think that an effective leader must possess, and why?

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Dear Reader,

That is how I started a blog post to my Ibuildings friends yesterday announcing that I will be leaving the company in December. It has been a great time for me – and I hope for them as well – but my time there is drawing to a close.
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Dear Reader,

This is the last of my CodeWorks 09 posts. For those of you looking for the slides from my talks, I just wanted to point you to my new Talks page. It is where I will archive my slides for all conferences, starting with CodeWorks.

Each time I give a talk, it changes a little so I will upload the new version and mark them with the conference name and year.

Until next time,
I <3 |<
=C=

Dear Reader,

Well CodeWorks 09 is over and I’ve mostly recovered. (I still have a bit of a cold that I picked up in NYC but other than that, I’ve recovered) I did a total of 24 sessions across 7 cities and enjoyed every one of them. Each city was different and it’s impossible for me to pick one as my favorite. So I’m going to list my favorite memory from each city.

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Dear Reader,

CodeWorks 09 Vital Stats

CodeWorks 09 day #: 14
Cities left: 0
Miles Traveled: 9,677
Cups of Coffee: 23
Current Current City: New York, NY

Random Statistic of the day

New friends made while on the Codeworks tour: hundreds
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Dear Reader,

CodeWorks 09 Vital Stats

CodeWorks 09 day #: 12
Cities left: 1
Miles Traveled: 9,472
Cups of Coffee: 18
Current Current City: Washington DC
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Dear Reader,

CodeWorks 09 Vital Stats

CodeWorks 09 day #: 10
Cities left: 2
Miles Traveled: 7,987
Cups of Coffee: 14
Current Current City: Miami
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Dear Reader,

CodeWorks 09 Vital Stats

CodeWorks 09 day #: 8
Cities left: 3
Miles Traveled: 7,324
Cups of Coffee: 12
Current Current City: Atlanta

Random Statistic of the day

Bags left on the hotel shuttle: 1
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Dear Reader,

CodeWorks 09 Vital Stats

CodeWorks 09 day #: 6
Days till I see the Lovely and Talented Kathy:1
Cities left: 4
Miles Traveled: 7,062
Cups of Coffee: 7
Current Current City: Dallas

Random Statistic of the day

Number of Taxicabs “redecorated” by conference speakers: 1
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Dear Reader,

CodeWorks 09 Vital Stats

CodeWorks 09 day #: 4
Days till I see the Lovely and Talented Kathy:3
Cities left: 5
Miles Traveled: 5,823
Cups of Coffee: 5
Current Current City: Los Angeles

Random Statistic of the day

Price of a double shot of Jack Daniels in LA: $25
Price of a bottle of Jack Daniels in Nashville: $20
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Dear Reader,

CodeWorks 09 Vital Stats

CodeWorks 09 day #: 2
Days till I see the Lovely and Talented Kathy:05
Cities left: 6
Miles Traveled: 5,486
Cups of Coffee: 2
Current Current City: San Francisco

Random Statistic of the day

Length of time it takes to walk someone through rebooting a Linux server hosted on SliceHost over the phone: 2 minutes (Assuming they don’t lock the account trying to guess your password first. If they do, add 5 minutes)
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Dear Reader,

CodeWorks 09 Vital Stats

CodeWorks 09 day #: 0
Days till I see the Lovely and Talented Kathy:07
Cities left: 7
Miles Traveled: 0
Cups of Coffee: 0
Current Current City: Utrecht

Random Statistic of the day

Number of takes for me to get a video right while sitting at a table with the waitresses all staring at me: 2
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