NJ Code Camp II... Success!

Chip Lemmon — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 22:23:00 GMT

Well as I've come to expect after a Code Camp I am recharged and psyched about programming again. Like NJ Code Camp I, I met a lot of great people and made some new friends.

I have to say that I'm a bit shocked that there was more controversy in my “Down with Datasets!” session than my session on “Living in an Out-Sourced World”. I appreciate the honest and open dialog in both sessions. I received some great challenges to my stance on using custom objects over datasets. I really got out of this session exactly what I had hoped to and that was some real good discussion on overall architecture and design principals. Even if John and Kevin left me bruised from the pro-dataset camp. It was still great fun.

I was truly amazed at how my “Living in an Out-Sourced World” presentation went. First of all I was nervous about presenting such a risky topic. Secondly I wasn't sure that many people would attend something a bit off topic. Yet I felt that Out-Sourcing and Off-Shoring were such important topics for the developer community that I had to take the chance. And what do you know? People came. And people participated. The big shocker though was how the attendees were very academic about Out-Sourcing and Off-Shoring. I'd say 99% of the attendees felt that Out-Sourcing/ Off-Shoring was an integral part of the way business is conducted today. They also seemed to observe that there was a fair balance of pros and cons to the practice. We even got into discussing globalization, intellectual property concerns and innovation. I'd say this session exceeded my expectations by 200%. And I sincerely thank each and every attendee of this session as I really just moderated as you all provided the content.

I was fortunate enough to attend Dan Krhla's session on VB2005 for VB6 Developers. I am already fairly well versed in VS 2005 VB & C# and I still walked away with some great tips! And thank you John Baird for an excellent presentation on N-Unit. Unfortunately I only caught about half of it before I had to leave the room, but what I saw was great. John's enthusiasm about Test Driven Development and Agile Software Development got me excited about it too.

Lastly, thanks to Peter Laudati, Scott Watermasysk, and Don Demcsak for putting NJ Code Camp II together. I can hardly wait for NJ Code Camp III! Please remember to subscribe to the RSS feed at the NJ Code Camp site for updates! And if you missed NJ Code Camp II, you missed a lot. Be sure to attend the next one.

--chaz

Community Members Selling Ads on Free Community Blog Sites

Chip Lemmon — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 15:06:00 GMT

Oh come on DonXML! Don't you think you are being a little hard on those that sell ads on their blogs. Even if the hosting is provided free of charge, shouldn't people be able to be rewarded for their time and effort in gathering and creating their content?

Now regarding CommunityServer I agree with you and applaud your integrity! There is absolutely no reason for somebody to use it and earn a buck without purchasing the license. First of all it is so inexpensive that there is no excuse not to pay for such a quality tool. Again, not for profit organizations may be different as spelled out in the licensing agreement. But this brings us into the ethical issues of Open Source, GNU licensing variations, standard software licensing and peoples' adherence to them. I'd like to believe that if people are using software in violation of a licensing agreement that it is an issue of ignorance. However, I am not naive and I know there are those out there that directly and knowingly take advantage of licensing regulations.

It is everybody's responsibility to understand product licenses and adhere to the rules. Otherwise, the IT job that is cut due to lost revenue might be your own some day!

--chaz.

Ethics

NJ Code Camp II... Success!

Community Members Selling Ads on Free Community Blog Sites