Yes I'm going to discuss this again, so if you know me personally, or have heard me talk about it before, just click the "Delete" button :)
Somewhere around the fall of 2003 I was working for what was essentially a failed dot com. The product was great, but nobody could figure out how to get US banks to buy into it. Maybe someday, but not then, and not even now for the unfortunate folks that are still trying to make it work.
I was working from home, elbow-deep in Win32, MFC, platform SDK in C++, using VC6 and had been doing so since 1995. You .ASP'ers had already slipped past me and the .NET 1.1 guys were on the scene causing no manner of problems with old guys like me trying to find a job.
I bought VS2003 on a faculty discount, and a Sam's "Learn VS2003 in 21 Days" book because it touched on lots of different areas of .NET
The book mentioned User Groups, so I did a search and found AZGroups. The absolute first 'meeting' I went to I had no clue what I was doing. It was in the evening at a school on Thomas Rd West of 15th ave. I think. I probably wouldn't swear to it, but I believe Scott Guthrie spoke, and demo'd stuff in what was most likely beta VS2005, and I watched amazed. I didn't win anything fun, but I left with a couple more books and more desire to learn.
I attended meetings, understanding the words but not the sentences, but I kept going, at least off and on, and gradually the sentences started making sense as well.
Through the fall of 2004 I went more regularly, and Scott Cate put on a Christmas get-together early in December. He had local software houses come in and demo things, and give away licenses. Many raffles, and lots of free stuff. I came away with "Hosting for Life" at DiscountASP.Net, and a bunch of stuff that fired up my interest another notch. One of the packages was DozingDogs, and I was having trouble so I contacted James Shaw. He turned out to be a heck of a nice guy, and turned me on to Steven Walther's ASP.NET Unleashed... great book, great advice.
I put WynApse.Com online in December of 2004, and it pretty well sucked, but it was alive, it was .NET 1.1, it talked to SQL Server, it didn't poot, and I was pretty pleased.
March 31, 2005 I got let go by the company that I had hung in with through all the crap they pulled. At the time it sucked really bad, but in retrospect, it was a loser job with a loser company doing win32 MFC with VC6 long past it's shelf-life.
I came home at noon, 56 years old, out of work, with skills people were not hiring for. I hit AZGroups with the post: "I Need a job" ... :) I got supportive messages and was directed to AZIPA. Through AZIPA I made contact with the folks I now work for, and (2-1/2 months later) started working for them doing .NET web database work supporting some very large web apps and 6 Microsoft Access apps with Oracle linked tables on the same database as the web apps.
Spin forward 2-1/2 years to yesterday with a whole day of 'geekness' in Phoenix: A Morning session with Rob Bagby doing LINQ, Astoria, and Entity Data Model, and Afternoon session with Joe Shirey on Office 2007 development and Windows Live, then a VS2008 Install Fest(ivus) until 10pm last night. In-between has been VS2005, the whole Silverlight thing, getting another hosting for life, and being awarded MVP.
I still have trouble passing the silly-axx interview questions that are asked, but fact is, I'm making damn good money working in this industry and staying on the edge of what's going on. I have friends or family ask if I'm getting ready to retire. Retire? I'm just hitting my stride!
But... would I be here today without my local user group... I don't think so! Last night we had 250+ people crammed into that room in Tempe watching cool demos of VS2008, Astoria, LINQ, and Silverlight. That was great, and in my opinion we all need to stay plugged in like that.
Metabuilders has a T-Shirt for sale on their site that reads "Sleep - the 10 best hours of the week" ... if you nodded your head and smiled at that, you're probably chasing the technology with me, and you need to be involved in a User Group.
We're coming up on New Years... make attending a User Group one of your professional enhancement resolutions. You owe it to yourself and your career and I'll see you at the meetings!
Stay in the 'Light!
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posted @ Friday, December 21, 2007 2:32 PM