October 10th 2012 was my last day at Xerox. I started at ACS in April 2000 which was acquired by Xerox in 2009. On Monday I am going to a small company out of Tampa called AgileThought which won the award for a Best place to work in Tampa Bay couple of years in a row. I’ll miss ACS/Xerox but I’ve been ready for something new for a while…
I just registered for the event of the year – Build 2012. This will be my first major conference and I am very excited. The registration opened couple of minutes early and by the time it was supposed to open the first 500 early-bird tickets were gone (I was able to get one). The whole conference sold out in about one hour. For comparison it took two months last year till it sold out. It seems that Microsoft is getting the developers more excited than ever…
2011 was a good year (mostly). I got into wp7 development and released a couple of somewhat successful applications. In mid December I noticed that I am getting close to a total of 100k downloads and took some drastic measures to reach that number by the end of the year. So now (a week later) I’m glad to report that around December 29th I did it. Next stop – 1 million downloads…
For me the gadget of the year (2011) is the $79 kindle. Not the Fire. Not the iPad. The cheapest kindle. I would have purchased the kindle touch for $20 more but it has a serious design flow – if you (like me) dislike fingerprints on the screen it can drive you crazy. The cheaper model has buttons for prev and next page and is actually a little bit smaller and lighter than the touch. You do not need a keyboard if you own a computer and I’m undecided on the 3G. And it is so small and thin and light. I read more books last moth (since I have it) than any other month in the year. What makes it really great is that you don’t have to wait for 2 days for your book to arrive from amazon, you can start reading in a minute. My wife has a “vintage” second generation kindle and she loves it but I can see the envy in her eyes… The only thing that feels wrong is that the ebooks are not really cheaper than the paper ones and even some times are more expensive…
The first (annual?) Orlando GiveCamp was held in the weekend of October 21-23 and I even helped a little bit with the organization. More than 50 people showed up and worked on about 10 projects for different non-profit organizations from Central Florida. It was an interesting experience, new people, smart people, good food and tons of fun. I am now a WordPress expert and MVC3 beginner 🙂 Hope to do that again next year…
After helping with the Orlando Code Camp this year I was invited to join the board of ONETUG. I will be responsible for the web site as well as anything else “tech”. I even hope to do a little talk in front of the group some time in the future (what topic?). ONETUG is my new home. I’m can’t be happier…
DevLabs is a place where Microsoft employees develop side projects that will eventually be included in future Microsoft products. “Experiment, evaluate, and then join [us] in the conversation.”
.less is an http handler that compiles css. Adds things like variables, mixins and nested rules.
Solving a Sudoku puzzle with a simple SQL query. Very cool…
Videos of PDC09 sessions now available for those of us who could not attend…
Zdravko Danev's dev blog 