Wanted to share a few posts from my fellow Microsoft Technical evangelists here in East Region, hopefully you’ll find them as interesting and useful as I did:
New Digs, Windows Azure and Orchard – Michael Cummings talks about the reasons he chose Windows Azure and Orchard CMS for his new blog. Given that I run my blog on Orchard (and just moved to Windows Azure), I thought it was interesting to compare his reasons to mine. Also interested to hear more about his idea for a Bing search module.
From Steve Maier comes The Puppy Eat, a somewhat sick and twisted casual game for Windows 8, but quite well-executed, and fun, if you don’t take it too seriously.
Jim O’Neil has a good post on using Fiddler to test an APIMASH app. Of course, the technique can be used on any Windows Store app you happen to be developing.
Jesse Freeman is starting a new event series for game developers looking for focused coding time, called Game Developer Studio Time. If you’re in the NYC area, you should definitely check it out!
Maria Naggagareminds us that Unity is offering $100,000 in prizes, including a $30,000 grand prize, for the best apps and games built with Unity 3d, and as a bonus, she’s got a dancing elephant!
Want to get a better handle on building a site or app on Windows Azure, and keep costs in line? Check out part 2 of Brian Hitney‘s “Building for Cost” series. Part 1 is available here.
If you’re looking for info on Virtualization, Hybrid Cloud, or SharePoint, or if you’re an IT pro focused group in Mid-Atlantic looking for a good speaker, you should check out my IT evangelist peer Yung Chou.
It’s taken me a bit longer to get to this post than I’d anticipated, but I wanted to share some info on the Mid-Atlantic Developer Expo, which wrapped it’s second iteration at the end of June. As with the first MADExpo in 2011, it was a fun event, combining software from a wide variety of platforms (from Windows 8 to iOS, from Perl to Ruby), with a healthy dose of hardware hacking and demos, along with a program for kids.
This year we added a third day, spread the MADKidz mini-conference over a couple of days, and welcomed nearly 250 folks to the Hampton Roads Convention Center for 3 days of learning, networking, and inspiration.
We had a great attendee party at a local venue called Cinebistro, which featured bowling, pool, great munchies, and more. And a pleasant surprise was that they did not have blasting music that made it impossible to talk (something which is unfortunately all too common for similar venues), so there was much great conversation, in addition to all the bowling and other fun.
I also had the pleasure of meeting a couple of folks from my travels in .NET Gadgeteer, including Gus Issa, founder and President of GHI Electronics (GHI makes many of the Gadgeteer boards and modules I use…full disclosure: Gus occasionally provides boards and/or modules to me for testing or demo projects at no cost…though my wife would tell you I’ve also spent plenty of my own money on GHI products as well). Gus was a small business sponsor at the conference, and we had a great time talking about some ideas for how to make our demo area even more awesome for 2013. I also finally got to meet Valentin Ivanov (aka Architect) who is arguably THE most knowledgeable person I know about .NET Gadgeteer and .NET Micro Framework stuff. There’s a reason he’s called a Legend in the TinyCLR community.
Thank Yous
The first important task is thanking all the folks who made it possible:
Steve Bodnar – Steve led our team as the President of MADExpo, and did so with his usual professionalism and diligence. Steve provides a great backbone for the organization, and his leadership is greatly appreciated.
Steve Presley – The other Steve in our organization (having 2 Steves makes our conference calls pretty interesting), Steve Presley once again wore many hats, from web guru, to helping compile the schedule, to organizing content for integration with EventBoard, to late night badge printing, and probably some areas I don’t even know about. Steve rocks.
Kevin Griffin – Kevin led the speaker selection and scheduling, and still managed to make it to the conference despite the impending arrival of a new baby. No stress there.
Pete Brown – For the second year, Pete led the planning and recruiting for our hardware demo room. Pete and I had fun with it this year, with both of us having a table full of gear at one end of the room, and each of us got to have our own huge LCD monitor for showing off code and such (courtesy of Steve Bodnar’s company, Geeks and Gurus). Pete is a geek’s geek, and I can’t imagine anyone else running the demo show at MADExpo.
Justin Etheredge – Justin stepped it up a notch this year, taking on a major role in recruiting and organizing sponsors for this year’s conference. Sponsors are absolutely key to any event of this size, so thanks to Justin for his great work in this area.
Perry Neal – Perry was another key player in identifying and getting commitments from sponsors. Perry did lots of legwork to ensure that we could afford to feed all of our attendees, among other things.
Joel Cochran, Jim Christopher, and Sean and Jean Westcott – Joel and Jim did a great job teaching day 1 of MADKidz, providing an introduction to programming via Small Basic. And Sean and Jean brought their Introduction to Electronics 101 session to MADKidz, teaching about circuits and soldering. All of them were a huge help in making MADKidz a success this year.
My fellow Microsofties, Dani Diaz and David Isbitski – Dani and Dave came down to speak for the second year in a row. Dave was a big help with the Windows 8 camp day that was part of my responsibilities at the event. Dave gave two of the 5 talks, while Dani picked up one, plus another session he did on cloud development for mobile devices.
Kristy Moon – After volunteering on-site last year, this year Kristy used her awesome web design skills to give our website a makeover. What was amazing was that she didn’t throw everything out and start from scratch. Instead, she made many changes to the existing site, some obvious (including some great logos and imagery for MADKidz and the site as a whole) and some subtle, to bring a wonderful level of polish and cohesiveness to the site.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t again thank my wife Jennifer, who helped with MADKidz, FedExKinkos runs, and more. Thanks also to Kevin Jones, who helped out onsite with bag stuffing and check-in (and thanks to all the other folks who helped with bag stuffing as well). Several speakers also helpfully volunteered to help with setup tasks on Wednesday morning, as well as helping us break things down on Friday. You all rock!
Lots of other folks from the local developer community joined us on planning calls, offered ideas, and helped in a variety of ways. Thanks to everyone who contributed.
Last, but not least, thanks again to all our Sponsors, without whom there’d be no MADExpo. Please visit their sites, and thank them for sponsoring MADExpo.
Links
Here are some links to blog posts about this year’s conference:
The robot from the Menchville FIRST Robotics team plays catch with some of the kids at MADExpo
[photo no longer online]
Attendee party at Cinebistro. Bowling, pool, munchies, and great family-friendly fun.
[photo no longer online]
A couple of the MADKidz learning about electronics (with a gratuitous plug for Telerik, who was one of the sponsors for MADKidz and brought all kinds of SWAG to boot). Hard to tell from the back, but I think the boy on the left is one of Steve Bodnar’s kids, while on the right I’m fairly sure is my oldest son, Joseph.
vintagejoehill Just spoke @MADExpo and it was a blast. Lots of great questions about Aeir Talk from very nice developers from all over. Squee! #MADExpo
ondrejbalas So much cool stuff at #madexpo that I had to run up to my room to hack away at something.. will be back to watch @jayharris ‘s SEO session
sbohlen watching the young kidz at @madexpo get excited about #robotics is an absolute B L A S T! I remember the sense of wonder at that age too!
bugbytesinc Having a great time at #MADExpo wish more of my dev buddies were here.
Last year, it was my privilege to be a part of the team that brought a new conference to the Mid-Atlantic, the Mid-Atlantic Developer Expo (or MADExpo for short). The conference was born of many conversations and discussions in the community from folks wanting to do something a little bigger and bolder than some of the usual events we were used to. So I, Steve Bodnar, Steve Presley, Kevin Griffin, Sara Faatz. Kevin Hazzard, Pete Brown, Rich Dudley, and a team of volunteers planned and executed the first event last summer.
Why We Did It
Our goal was to create a fun and informative conference with some unique aspects. We included a full-day kids conference called MadKidz, run by Kevin Hazzard (with help from his family), which was a big hit. We included a dedicated room for hardware and NUI demonstrations, featuring a local FIRST robotics team, Chiptunes demo, Kinect and Surface demonstrations, the founder of Secret Labs, maker of Netduino, and all the geeky toys Pete Brown could pack into one table.
We had a keynote by Jeff Prosise, a Wintellect co-founder, on his passion for radio controlled flying, including a 1/6th-scale F-16 onstage. We brought folks to one of the finest facilities on the east coast, the Hampton Roads Convention Center, in the heart of Virginia’s Tidewater, a short drive from the beach, theme parks, and all the history you could want for a summer vacation. And with the assistance of great sponsors, we kept it affordable enough that just about anyone could come.
Day 1 of the inaugural Mid Atlantic Developer Expo is done, and I’m settled in to try to get some rest for day 2, which promises more awesome content and great conversations.
We kicked the day off today with an incredible talk by Wintellect‘s Jeff Prosise, entitled “Why I Love the Smell of Jet Fuel in the Morning” discussing his love of R/C jet aircraft, and how that passion relates to his success in the software development world.
The two highlights of the keynote were the 1/6th scale F-16 that shared the stage with Jeff (and which Jeff built by hand), and the final video Jeff showed, which featured clips of what happens when things go wrong with R/C jets. Suffice it to say, there were several fireballs involved (I’ll see if I can get a copy of the video from Jeff to share). Continue reading MADExpo Kicks Off in Style!
