Florida UG Community

Window 7 Launch Event – Ft Lauderdale / Miami

Dave Noderer — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:53:08 GMT

I'm at the Windows 7 launch event in Ft. Lauderdale working the community booth with Alex Funkhouser, Kathy Malone and a brief celebrity appearance by Shervin Shakibi,

Here are some pictures I took this morning!

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Kickstartz Weekend Report

Dave Noderer — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:42:24 GMT

This past weekend (June 18-20) the first South Florida Kickstartz program was held at DeVry University in Miramar, FL.

On Thursday night something like 20 ideas were presented and discussed with each on getting a paste up sheet on the wall with notes.

On Friday, a few more ideas were presented and as a group we culled the ideas and combined a few down to four, three of which were launched into groups for further work.

One of the ideas I had proposed, a home energy monitor was worked on my myself, Lee Culver, Joshua and Alex Mask.

We spent the first couple of hours investigating hardware and concluded that there was no AC control / plug that both controlled the device and also monitored the power.

The other technical area we investigated was control and monitoring software. There are some commercial standards out there like x10 and we ended up looking a bit deeper into Zwave. Did not go too far down this but I did order the sdk.

Then we drew a simple system diagram and posted on a web page with the “company” name PowerLinCo.com.

So… we didn’t start a company but did take the idea a few steps further. Perhaps this will turn into a student senior project at Devry.

The other idea that might end up getting launched was my pet project, www.floridasolarpower.com. This was part of the fourth set of ideas that was still up on the wall but not being actively worked. Jace expressed his interest in the core idea of starting a community around renewable energy much like we have done over the past nine years with the .net software developer community.

So after some discussion we outlined some ideas and came up with a new name.. RenewableEnergyGuild. I’ve included some of the notes below.

What is it

Develop a community around renewable energy

Consumer oriented

Monthly meetings?

Speakers / presentations / demonstrations

Field Trips

Members - Who is it?

Will John Q public show up?

Tree huggers

Sierra club in Florida?

National Wildlife

Horticulture??

Organic

Homeowner associations / condo's

Demo green facility

Boys and Girls club?

Sponsors / speakers

Vendors

Government agencies

SF Water management

Power companies

FPL

Home power magazines

Solar Today – ASES

As for the other groups, Kathy Malone made progress in the area of information pertaining to hazardous chemicals and Jason Milgram and a large group worked out a number of details around a secure document transfer/tracking service.

Marc Asselin did a fantastic job of organizing this first Kickstartz event and we all learned a lot about various technologies and how to improve the next event.

Thanks to everyone who participated and sponsored the event!!

Kickstartz Weekend Video

Dave Noderer — Fri, 15 May 2009 20:15:02 GMT

Marc Asselin has put together a short video about the Kickstartz entrepreneur weekend coming up June 18-20 2009.

Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ppl5kQQ8hE

Kickstartz website: tp://www.kickstartz.com/

Ft Lauderdale Online – 1st Meeting

Dave Noderer — Wed, 06 May 2009 07:44:00 GMT

We had the first online version of the Ft Lauderdale developer group meeting tonight.

Eighteen people were online but i was the only one with a web camera… I hope more start getting the video cranked up!

The topic was Introduction to MVC and was suppose to be given by Jim Zimmerman out of Tampa but he called at 5:30 (for the 6:30 meeting) reporting that his laptop power brick was toast and he was out of juice. He had tried to get another one but at this point he was dead in the water because his presentation was on the laptop too….

So he gave David Hayden a call who agreed to do the presentation as they are planning to do some of this for the TampaDev.org group too. That group is focused exclusively on MVC, at least for now.

David did a great job of just going through the basics of an mvc app, no power points, just use visual studio and make a project. We dug into the T4 templates a bit and also validation. There were a number of questions that sparked additional discussion.

I used live meeting to record it all to.

A link to the recorded meeting can be found here: https://www311.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/view?cn=&id=PZ6Z2C&pw= no key is required.

More information, video’s, etc at: http://asp.net

Lots more info at the Tampa Bay Developers MVC group: http://tampadev.org

First South Florida SQL Meeting

Dave Noderer — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:27:06 GMT

Thanks to Scott Klein for organizing a set of SQL focused meetings here in South Florida.

The first meeting was held in West Palm Beach at the Palm Beach County building on 8/7/08. I took a few pictures you can see at: http://cid-e8348157304bce63.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/FlaDotNet/20080807%7C_WestPalm%7C_SQLPass.zip

Eitght of us were there and as it was mostly an organizational meeting, we dicussed the location, topics and format of meeting that would be good. The topics were pretty straight forward:

Reporting Services
Basic SQL Server
- Connection types
- Management Studio

Clustering / Mirroring
Replication
Integration Services
Oracle
Tools
- Apex SQL
- ANTS -
- Toad for Oracle
- SQL Navigator
- Team System
- SQL Programmer
- Management Studio
- Red Gate -
- Data Conversion

Format wise, Terry Carrol suggested having 1/2 hour at the beginning of each meeting to have a round table technical discussion.

Scott already has a number of speakers lined up and is planning on a monthly meeting in West Palm and also in either Ft Lauderdale or Miramar.

He is making arrangements to put up a website. In the meantime, i've put up the announcments on the FlaDotNet website and am including the info in the weekly emails.

We discussed SQL Pass organization. Joe Homnick and the Gold Coast User Group has long been the SQL Pass Chapter but not 100% focused on SQL. As part of starting the new groups, Scott has been in contact with Joe Homnick who agreed to Scott starting up the new groups but no mechanics to link them together is in place yet.

Other plans are to host a SQL Saturday sometime in 2009.

We did spend some time discussing SQL 2008 which just went to RTM.

For more information and to help Scott in these efforts, send him an email at: ScottKlein@sqlxml.com

XP Lego game at Ft Lauderdale Agile

Dave Noderer — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:05:20 GMT

Sitting here watching Adrian Wible run the eXtreme Programming Lego game.

~ 40 people have been split into 6 groups, each with a number of cards describing customer wishes and a pile of legos.

Pictures at: http://geekswithblogs.net/dnoderer/gallery/8256.aspx

Video :

Process shortened for the 1.5 hr meeting. The goal is three iterations.

Step 1: Estimation: 10 min - Relative difficulty

Step 2: Prioritization: 5 min. - What is the most important

Step 3: Signup: 5 min - What to do for the 1st iteration (5 min)

Step 4: Development: 5 min - Implement the signup

Step 5: Testing / Totals: 10 Min - Measure actual against estimated effort and the signup / actual value

Step 6: Retrospective: 5 min - Have both customers and teams review work.

Iteration #2 - 40 min - More requirements

IPM Iteration Planning Meeting - 20 min
- Estimation
- Prioritization
- Signup

Then steps 4,5,6 repeated.

Only got through 2 iterations by 8:45 pm so cut it off there. The 2nd iteration for all the teams was both more productive and generally much closer to the estimate.

This is giving us a lot of ideas for future meetings!

Does anyone else have interactive games like this??

DotNetRocks on Building Communities!

Dave Noderer — Sat, 24 May 2008 13:06:06 GMT

Even if you don't listent to DotNetRocks on a regular basis (you should!), if you are a user group leader or interested in starting a user group you should listen to this show.

It is been quite a while since DotNetRocks has had a community focused show.

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/

Show #344 | 5/22/2008 (69 minutes)
Building Communities at Dallas TechFest

Carl and Richard talk with three community leaders in Dallas about building communities, and specifically how you can directly benefit from participating locally.

This DotNetRocks session touchs on many of the most important points about running a user group.

A few things I can add...

- At one point INETA (International .NET Association, www.ineta.org), when the .net community was being built, had large user group leader summits that got a wide variety leaders and potential leaders and everyone always walked away pumped up and excited about all the new ideas they heard about at the sessions. This in my mind was another very significant benefit that INETA delivered. Unfortunately funding dried up as it was hard to make a case for the Microsoft "numbers" system to understand the much deeper reach this had on the community and Microsoft. Everyone leaving one of those meetings had a wide and lasting effect in their respecitve communities. None of us were smart enough to figure out how to translate this comitment to the very large numbers Microsoft likes to see!

- Another benfit of INETA in the early days was to really mentor new user group leaders and potential leaders. This was dropped at some point and personal and ongoing communications between INETA and the user group leaders was stopped. Having helped mentor many hundreds around the world to start user groups this was crucial at one point. The .net community has maturred now and perhaps this type of mentoring is not as important.

- One social / community building thing I like to do is to go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves.

Leaders, speakers and members can get to know who is in the room and what they might be interested in
Many of the developers may not be use to speaking in front of a crowd. I know it is small but believe just this small exercise may help some people out of their shell
It sets the tone for a more interactive meeting.

- I do agree that charging a small annual fee (I don't) is not necessairly bad and may be required if you have to pay for the venue (which usually is not necessary) but it does add a fairly significant additional set of tasks on a monthly basis for someone to collect money, keep track of the members, deposit money, write checks and do a bit of accounting at the very least. My thought is that all admin functions should be kept to a very small minimum, nobody really loves doing them and volunteer hours should be very carefully spent!

- We did a "Code Idol" meeting which was good but none of us could be mean like Simon! In the end, our judges were part of the vote but next time we will rely only on having all the participants face the front wall and have a silent vote by the rasing of hands. I think it is time to do another one!

- Thse days the Microsoft Developer Evangalists are very active in starting and supporting user groups, this was not always the case. So... if you are starting or want to start a user group, definitly find out who your most local DE is! Our DE's Joe Healy, Russ Fustino and Jeff Barnes are very active and Joe keeps the entire state of Florida influencers linked together. If you are having trouble finding out your local DE let me know, I can help you or direct you to someone who can.

- Finding committed volunteers for any organization is always a challenge. As Toy pointed out, you have to ask people to do things. Over time, some will respond and get interested, many will not. In all cases it has to be fun, even if it is a bit of work there has to be personal growth or reward or people will not do it over time.

Thats all for now!

Bhamas Dot Net Meeting

Dave Noderer — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:06:29 GMT

I was honored to be able to attend the first meeting of the Bahams .net (www.bahanet.org) user group in Nassau last week.

Kyle Baly (http://codebetter.com/blogs/kyle.baley/) organized the meeting held at a local comany IPBS.

Fairly small group but that is ok! None of them knew what to expect and surprisingly none of them were there due to a direct contact with Kyle but because someone told them about it.

After getting them warmed up to what was possible in learning, business networking and socializing, they all left very enthused and ready for the next meeting which as already been scheduled.

It does not seem that .net is quite as far along on the island as it is here in the states but maybe this is a message to me that we should address basic .net topics at our user group meetings in Florida. We have tried a few times but it has not continued. This was also brought up to me when someone who is fairly new to .net happened to go to the www.fladotnet.com webstie and looked at our first video (see link at bottom of right column) where Jason Beres was talking about basic clr and framework concepts (this was in the fall of 2001).

Another interesting thing was that there really is no techincal netowking to speak of in the bahams. Everyone who grew up there attended "COB", College of the Bahamass (http://www.cob.edu.bs/) but apparently students don't have access to free Microsoft software there and there is no continuing contact among the alumni.

So, even if there are qualified people on the island to do technical work (.net ,rpg, php, etc...) the tendancy is to go elsehwere, the United States or Canada for example.

People did not know about DotNetNuke, Robotics Studio and a number of other appealing dot net based projects and technologies they might be using.

It will be interesting to watch how this develops. The next meet scheduled for May 28th will cover basics of creating an asp.net website.

Thanks Kyle!!

TechEd 2008 Tweener Weekend - June 7/8

Dave Noderer — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:52:50 GMT

This year, US Teched will be held in Orlando starting on June 2^nd with the developer week and continuing the following week for IT Pros…

So it happens that the Orange County Convention Center is available and as many of you already know, the Florida people are putting together a number of things that include SQL, DotNet University, DotNetNuke, etc.. AND a Florida Code Camp which Shervin and I are heading up.

This is the first “tweener” weekend and may end up being a major event in and of itself. The will be lots of things going on before, during and after so even if you are not attending teched, a couple of nights in Orlando will be worth it!

Current schedule for code camp rooms: http://www.fladotnet.com/FloridaCodeCamp_2008_20080408.mht
More info on tweener weekend: www.tweenerweekend.com
Tweener weekend flyer: http://www.fladotnet.com/downloads/Inbetweenv04.pdf

Links to more information will be posted on the FlaDotNet.com site: http://www.fladotnet.com

Code Camp 2008 South Florida Done -- Whew!

Dave Noderer — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 02:43:38 GMT

It's all over, what a rush!

Final stats...

795 registered, over 600 showed up, 50 speakers gave 71 sessions over 12 parallel tracks.

We drank 1100 waters, 500 sodas, over 700 cups of coffee, ate 170 pizzas and used 300 pounds of ice.

Feedback can be viewed at: http://www.codecampevals.com/speakers/SpeakerEvals.aspx?CodeCampID=17

Some photos at: http://noderer.spaces.live.com/photos/cns!E8348157304BCE63!316/

Russ & Alex Photos:

http://blogs.msdn.com/rfustino/archive/2008/02/11/photos-from-the-code-camp-in-south-florida-2-2-2008.aspx

Speaker links as I get them: http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com/Speakers.aspx

Thanks to all the sponsors for making this great event happen!

No code camp would be possible without all the great speakers, some local and many who traveled to on their own with no monetary help from us. The entire developer community is grateful to each one!

I'd like to point out the other volunteers who helped make it all look easy! Many of them were speakers as well but I want to make sure they get the credit they deserve.

Ed Hill - Devry University Professor organized the venue, provided student volunteers, acted as "Intro to .NET" track chair, made multiple runs to Costco, received the material and was on the run all day Saturday during the event.

Scott Katarincic - created web administration pages without which we would have been poking in the datbase and the sesssion / speaker entries could not have been distributed.

Charles Curtis - Handled the sponsor images and displays, this was a big help!

DeVry Student Volunteers.. I don't have a list of names but without them and the help of Bob O'Connell (another Devry professor) we would have had to recruit a lot more volunteers for the day of the event. They did a great job, just point them in the right direction and they took off with the task at hand.

Alex Funkhouser - In charge of the T-shirts and t-shirt graphics plus organization of the commons for the sponsors and donated Mike Wasserman.

Mike Wasserman - Mike did all the legwork for organizing the speaker reception on Firday night and the post party at JP Mulligans on Saturday night. Both came off smoothly, people had plenty to eat and drink and did not go over the budget.

Jonas Stawski (Spanish), Larry Port (Agile), Jeff Barnes (Architecture) and Bill Reiss (Pre-Mix 08/Silverlight) stand out as excellent track chairs that spent considerable time thnking about and organizing their respective tracks.

I have to mention John Dunagan aka "ICE MAN" who for the second year in a row drove from Naples to deliver 300 pounds of ice... ok, he just poped over to public but it was a big help!

Mai Nguyen was our session monitor and kept a count of each session. Thanks!

Morgan Baker helped organize the un-organized speaker sessions with a spreadsheet that got us launched into the actual scheduling of sessions.

Shevin Shakibi as always provided great ideas and moral support and was the SQL/BI track chair.

Jose Luis Manners was a Spanish co-chair but was in the middle of a number of work issues and ended up being out of town during code camp.

Joe Healy as always was a great support but i think he enjoyed sitting back and watching it happen without a lot of his help. And this year he was very sick and just barely made it to code camp on Saturday! He helped locate and motivate a number of the speakers and as always is a valued part of the team!

Next year's code camp has been set for 2/8/2009.