Mentorship and Community

If you ask some of the people who know me well, you’ll find out that I’m pretty big on community in both professional life and life in general. Personally, I view it as a way to help others, be helped, and be exposed to things that you might not otherwise consider.

Since I graduated from college, it has seemed like, professionally, I’ve been on my own. I’ve had friends, but it felt like I had no sense of professional community.

From my viewpoint, it’s like I’ve been trapped in some sort of insular bubble and the only direction and inspiration for “what do I learn next” has been stumbled upon by either bare necessity of a project I’ve been working on or through running across a mention of something in an article online. This is, to be honest, a Sisyphean task and, after a while, it starts to become discouraging.

I’ve missed the sense of community, knowledge sharing, and mentorship that I had while I was in the last couple of years of high school and throughout my time in college. Due to the exposure to other people and their ideas, my own ideas seemed to flow much more smoothly and I worried less about making mistakes because there was always someone that I could bounce ideas off of or go to for advice.

Professional development seems to be so much more difficult when you feel like you’re doing everything on your own. Add to that the fact that we are inherently social creatures, and being on your own can be nerve wracking.

Last night, I had a realization: I seem to have found that sense of community and mentorship again. And it’s on…Twitter?

Okay, to be fair, it’s in person as well since I get to see a lot of the people I talk to at least once a month, but the bulk of conversations occur over digital medium (twitter, email, and Live messenger primarily).

Roughly a year and a half ago, I found CONDG online when I went looking to see if there were any .NET developer’s groups nearby (I know. Novel idea.). Their most recently listed meeting at the time had a twitter link for the presenter, so having just gotten twitter a few weeks before, I clicked on the link and checked out their stream.

It just sort of went from there.

Now I’ve gone from basically knowing nobody in the field in this geographic area (since most of my college friends in CS were from other parts of the state/country/world) to knowing a number of them and feeling much more like a person again than I did a year or so ago.

It’s nice to be part of a group of people who help each other out, offer advice, chat, joke around and hang out together on occasion, and, when needed, give a kick in the ass to get you going again.

I’ve missed the camaraderie and exposure to new things and viewpoints. Maybe even more than I realized. It’s also nice to know that I’m not the only one that experiences self doubt about their abilities and worries about failure (Even if Phil Japikse does use it as an opportunity to make a good-natured joke at my expense heh).

I try to give back as well, but I sometimes worry that I take more than I give in return. I honestly hope that isn’t the case, because they’ve all been great, and I don’t want to put any of them out. I also don’t want to feel like I’m being a bother

What brought on this realization? The feedback from my last post, mostly sparked by the first commenter, who called me arrogant. I got tweets and emails from a number of people that I follow and have met with advice and constructive criticism on both the post, aspects of my professional development, and my resume as well as assuring me that the post was not, in fact, arrogant but generally fairly sensible.

I appreciate the support, advice and critiques. Some changes have already been made to the resume (paring down some of the older experience, breaking out skills by skill level, etc) and others are planned.

As a (rather large) added bonus, I’ve started to feel a lot more social over the last year. I view this as a great thing because I basically used to be a social butterfly (as difficult as that may be for some people to believe).

Thanks again, guys. You’ve been great and I hope that I am able to return the favor in at least some small way.

Current mood: humbled
Current music: Bush – Swallowed

Stir Trek 2 – Brief Review, Musings, and Mayhem
(I apologize if this is a little long, but it covers a decent amount of ground)

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been averaging about 5 hours or so of sleep a night due to studying, interviews, preparing for interviews and trying to get actual work done. It seems like I’m never making any headway, because the list of things I need to take care of is growing so quickly lately (but, honestly, that’s largely a positive thing considering the items getting stored in my queue).

That said, I was really looking forward to attending Stir Trek, a local developer conference. Admittedly, I was also sort of dreading taking the time off because I knew I’d feel guilty for losing the day and a half from all of the tasks I currently have. However, I knew I both needed the break and would get more out of it than the time I lost by going.

I’m glad I did.

The night before, there was a geek dinner at the food court in Polaris Fashion Place with a pretty large turnout. It was a fun and pretty relaxed event, and a nice way to ease into my “weekend”.

The conference itself was great, and full of things that I now want to look into. I stuck mainly to the web dev and RIA tracks, but wandered over into the UX talk as well.

For those of you who are actually curious as to which talks I went to, here’s the rundown:

• ASP.NET MVC v2 by Steve Horn
• Understanding User Experience Design Patterns by Ambrose Little
• JQueryUI – The Magic From Behind The Curtain by Phil Japikse
• What's New in ASP.NET 4.0 by Steve Smith

The presentation materials should be up on the presenters’ sites in the near future, so keep an eye out if any of the synopses sound interesting.

The last session was really a toss up between the ASP.NET talk and Bill Sempf’s “Economics of Cloud Computing”. I was kind of upset that I had to chose, but that happens sometimes.

Thankfully, I had a minute to stop in before Bill’s talk and say hello in person since we’ve been speaking over twitter and MSN so much lately. I dropped off a box of tea that I’d brought for him (yes, I got to tea bag the mighty Sempf heh) and I got a copy of his new book, C# All In One to read and review.

This means that my work queue just got a little longer, but I’m glad to do it for a number of reasons - among them because it’s always nice to have quality reference materials and the fact that Bill’s a good guy. He’s also one of the many people who have been helping me on my current job search, so the least I can do is lend a hand in return.

It also means that I get to play part of my former role as an editor again, which is kind of neat.

One of the other great things about the conference was that I got to meet a lot of people in person for the first time that I’d been talking to on twitter as well as meeting a large number of new people and getting to hang out with people that I’ve known in the community for varying amounts of time.

To top it off, I finally got to repay my debt to Phil Japikse by poking him with a stick (I threatened to do it months ago, but it’s the first time since then that I’ve seen him). I also got to heckle him good naturedly a little as well as help solve a minor technical problem. =]

I love Phil. He’s a decent guy and one of the many people I’ve met since I started going to CONDG who amaze me by how much they give back in the form of time, experience, inspiration and encouragement.

To be honest, I love pretty much all of the Columbus dev community that I’ve met so far. They’ve made me feel welcome since the first meeting I went to.

For the movie this year, we had Iron Man 2. All that needs to be said is that it was amazing and under “Badass” in the dictionary, it says “See: Tony Stark. See Also: Natasha Romanoff.”

Karyl and I were going to drop in on the geek dinner after the movie, but it appeared to be pretty crowded and we were both feeling a little overloaded (the conference had 600 people registered and it’s been a while since I’ve been in a crowd of that size for that long. Add on the stress of the last few weeks, and I basically just wanted to wind down gracefully before driving out of there).

I apologize to anyone who was hoping to hang out at the dinner. I had planned to attend; I just sort of reached my stimulus threshold. Hopefully we’ll get the chance to hang out another time.

Current mood: tired, but good
Current music: Aerosmith – Deuces Are Wild

It’s not distracting. I’m just a freak.

January’s CONDG meeting featured David Giard (DavidGiard) speaking about Microsoft’s Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF).

The technology looks interesting and I may have to look into it when I have some free time, but it’s not the only thing during the presentation that caught my eye. As stupid as it may sound, one of the things that got my attention was that, in his code samples, many of his variables were declared as var instead of using explicit type declaration.

I’d looked at non explicit type declaration before and had decided that there was no real benefit to it and that its main impact was to decrease readability. However, seeing it used rather liberally in David’s code, I thought I might want to take another look.

The MSDN documentation still left me with my original thought on the subject, so, since I follow people who almost certainly know more on the subject than I do, I turned to twitter.

The conclusion that was arrived at regarding the matter was that they were useful when using LINQ, but tended to hamper readability and introduced some ambiguity into the code that the complier might not always sort out the way you want it to otherwise.

The really neat part of the twitter exchange was that David himself ended up chiming in as well because he still wasn’t sold on it either and was wondering much the same thing that I was, having run into it in a code review that day (a few days after his presentation).

So, on the upside, at least I wasn’t the only one who thinks about/isn’t sure about this sort of thing. I consider this a positive thing because I always feel like such a noob no matter how much I learn (I’ll get to that a little later).

David did, however, have another concern as well – that his code examples were distracting attention from what he was trying to introduce people to. In all honesty, since I said I started thinking about it due to his presentation, it was a legitimate concern.

I had to assure him that it didn’t distract from his presentation, but, rather that the problem was with me (I tend to jokingly end that statement with “because I’m a freak”).

The fact is that I tend to notice a *lot* of things and retain, at least for a while, more than a little of it. This is especially true when I’m someplace where I’m already trying to pay attention.

To be honest, I used to retain almost *everything* that I ran across before I started dealing with certain stressors that tend to divert my attention more often than I’d like (this will, hopefully, change here before too long as I don’t like the way said stressors are affecting me). Granted, I tend to have problems when I’m overloaded, and one of the first things to go is my ability to remember names of people I’ve just met (faces I generally have nailed, but names are another matter, so if I forget your name, it’s not an insult).

Now, to return briefly to the fact that I always feel like a noob.

The CONDG meetings now have a short talk after the main presentation, and January’s was presented by Leon Gersing (fallenrogue), the subject of which was change.

The talk itself was very good and, with the things going on at the moment seemed rather like a cosmic clue-by-four, but the pertinent part of the talk for this entry is the fact that some of us feel like we never know enough and we’re never ready.

I hung my head and raised my hand in the back of the room, getting called out good-naturedly by Leon for it. heh

Sometimes I have to slap myself and tell myself that I’ll never know everything (I hate not knowing something - as people who know me well can attest) and that I have to just start on the project and work out the rest of the problems as they come up.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I know far too many people that know *way* more than I do, so I always feel like I'm playing catch-up. Not that being around very smart, knowledgeable people is a problem, just that I always feel so behind by comparison. =]

Once I get into the groove, I don’t tend to sweat it, but the initial uncertainty (and, at times, insecurity) drives me up the wall. It even occasionally makes me want to hide under my bed because I always feel like everyone *else* knows this stuff and I’m the only clueless one even though I know that isn’t true (and, furthermore, I know that most people tend to make this crap up as they go along while trying to look all knowing).

You know that famous interview question of “What’s your greatest weakness?” That’s mine, though I usually phrase it that I sometimes worry about the details too much, because that really is the long and the short of it (plus it has the bonus that, unlike putting it the other way, it doesn’t make me sound neurotic lol).

Current mood: tired but caffeinated
Current music: Tonic - Open Up Your Eyes