Donald Belcham is a senior software developer, independent contractor, and agile development expert who is a strong supporter of fundamental OO patterns and practices. He is co-author of the book, “Brownfield Application Development in .NET” (Manning Press, 2008), and actively shares his expertise with other technical professionals at user groups, code camps and conferences held throughout the world. Past lectures have covered topics that encompass development practices, quality team leadership, and the intricacies of new and emerging technologies.
Incorporated into each lecture, blog entry and publication is Donald’s strong belief that the industry requires developers who are true craftsman; individuals who demonstrate a superior level of quality and are dedicated to producing applicable solutions that will consistently meet the unique needs and objectives of their clients. These types of craftsman show progressive advancement of skill and ability - similar to that which would be seen in an Apprentice/Journeyman/Master model.
In addition to acting as a mentor and keynote speaker, Donald has led a wide range of highly successful projects and developed top-performing teams. He is currently working on a set of .NET 3.5 services that will deliver business functionality to one of the largest public portals in Canada. For the past three consecutive years (2007, 2008, and 2009), Donald has held the prestigious title of Microsoft MVP in C# for his vast technical skill, leadership and community contribution; one of approximately 15 programmers in Canada, and one of approximately 300 in the world to achieve this distinction.
Donald is a founding member and the current president of the Edmonton .NET User Group.
During his career, Donald has been a member or lead of a number of different teams ranging in size from two up to sixteen developers. On the occasions where he has been asked to be a lead for those teams he has managed up to thirteen .NET developers combined with three COBOL developers. Responsibilities have varied to include deciding, leading and maintaining team culture and practices, managing team and individual work loads, and providing technical guidance and mentoring. The members of these teams have been co-located, located in multiple adjacent buildings as well as remote workers. Donald's experience managing team members under tight deadlines and with imposing technical learning curves has been extensive.
Projects that Donald has worked on have varied from Window's client applications to web applications. The architectures have varied from simple client server to complex asynchronous messaging systems requiring integration with numerous third party and legacy systems. In all of these cases, Donald's belief in fundamental development skills for himself and his team mates has allowed them to adapt and adjust their solutions with ease and fluidity.
Along with a varied set of architectural complexity, Donald has been exposed to a number of different industries. He has worked closely gathering specifications at varied levels from business users in industries that include forestry, insurance, gas distribution, and media. During these experiences he has shown himself quite capable of listening to, understanding and proposing solutions that both work for the business and the end user of the application.
When working directly on application development tasks, Donald works with a myriad of tools that are related to the .NET Framework and both the Visual Basic and C# languages. Choosing the best technology to solve the problem at hand is a core concept in the development practices that Donald espouses. While he strives to maintain current on the newest technologies in the industry, choice of technology for a given project is driven by the needs of the business client, technical clients and the problem being solved.
Additionally, Donald has contributed to a number of Open Source and Community projects. On the open source side, he provides his own assembly of functionality that he commonly uses on projects: IglooCommons. He's also a contributor to the open source EViL validation library.
Donald is also the current custodian of two community projects. One is the codebase for the Alt.Net Canada conferences. The other project is known as Kassandra and is a tool that converts text in standard MS Word documents into a format that is much easier for a visually impared student to read. More information on the Kassandra project is available in the following links:
At different times through the years Donald has participated in a number of different online webcasts, screencasts, podcasts as well as having written some online articles. Some of them are listed below: