June 2006 Entries

Edmug is north (notice the little 'n' not the big 'N' like Ollie North). Edmonton is the most northerly provincial (not including the territories) capital in Canada. We're 53°34' north. We just passed the longest day of the year which held 17 hours and 6 minutes of daylight plus twilight. Because of this and the great weather we've received this week, I spent a few hours siting on a local pub's patio with Jean-Luc David after he presented for Edmug. While we were sitting there it some how came up that Edmug may be the...

In this, the final post in the User Group Startup series, I'm going to explore some of the ideas that we at Edmug have batted around. The ideas I'll present here are ones that, while possibly benefitial to you user group, don't directly the effectiveness of running a group or holding events. The one segment of your user group that they could influence is your membership. These ideas are meant to be ways to get out to more people and potentially make the existing members more active and passionate about the local community.Extending your reach can take...

In this installment of the second to last installment of this series I'll discuss one of the most difficult tasks you face while running a user group. Once you have a group started, meetings and events are being held, and people are attending you will have to figure out how to keep the momentum going. Having only run a user group for a few months I hope that I have it figured out so that I can both impart knowledge on you and keep my user group rocketing along.One of the most obvious ways (to me anyways) to...

In the sixth installment of this series we'll discuss meeting and event content and how important it is to creating a great community. Developers, by our nature, are an inquisitive group of individuals. Most developers have realized that they will need to continually adjust their knowledge if they want to stay at the top of their game. Community, which is what we're trying to create through user groups and other events, is defined by dictionary.com as "sharing, participation and fellowship". The first word in that definition is sharing and there are a number of ways to...

It's so darn beautiful outside today that I thought I'd sit on my deck and add another entry to my series on User Group Startups. This time around I'll write about meeting and event locations. If you are looking at holding reoccurring meetings, as most user groups do, location selection is a big deal. If you have to change your meeting locations regularly (I might even argue that if you have to change them at all) you run the risk of confusing and alienating your members. Holding special events such as code camps at different locations...

In this installment of my Startup Stories I'm going to talk about the hardware and setup you'll need for your meetings. When you attend events, whether they are company meetings, user groups or conferences, there is an expectation of that a certain amount of preparation will have been done in advance. Hopefully the ideas that I will talk about here will help you to achieve meetings and events where no attendee ever things about the preparations involved.Meeting/Event setup involves a number of different things.Ensure your location is booked and confirmed prior to the event date. (more on locations...

John Bristowe's Developer Night In Canada just released its latest episode featuring a talk with D'Arcy Lussier. Mister Lussier talks about how INETA helps with user group operations, support and knowledge. D'Arcy even went so far as to mention Edmonton's newest user group (us for those of you who add 2 and 2 to get 5). To quote D'Arcy "The guys there (Edmonton) are really on fire. They have a good executive in place and they're really rarin' to get Edmonton hot...". I agree with him whole heartedly. The leadership that I'm working with...

Yesterday and today I spent the better part of the day setting up a Cruise Control server for my dev team to use. This is my second attempt at this task. On the first attempt I made the mistake of trying to piece together our nAnt build files so that they could be called by CCNet and in the end I wouldn't have to do much work. Well, that was a gong show and by the end of my last release cycle I had quit using CCNet.This attempt will be different (I hope). One of my...

In installment three of my User Group Startup stories I'm going to discuss ways to make contact with the developers in your community. There are a number of different ways that we've used with Edmug to make contact with our community. I'll comment on those, plus I will briefly discuss a few that I've heard from other user group leaders.Making contact with your community is one of the most important things that your Membership Director will do. Although you don't need monumental attendance numbers for your meetings or group, making your events known to the largest number...

Once you've decided that you are going to start a user group and you're going about it with passion and conviction it's time to get together a leadership team. I want to emphasis the word team here. The local user group that I attended before helping to found Edmug was run by two people. One of the things that we noticed, and voiced while planning our new group, was that the two leaders of the previous group were stretched very thin. Let this be fair warning to you. Starting and running a user group well...

If you came to me and said that you were thinking about starting a User Group I'd ask you one question: Why?The reasons for wanting to start a User Group vary. Perhaps the city/town that you live in doesn't currently have a group. Maybe there are groups but they don't focus on the technologies that you're interested in. Because there already was a .NET User Group in our city, our reasons were slightly different than most. A number of us attended the existing group's meetings religiously but were disappointed with it's inability to capture and...

I'm going to start a series of posts on what I've experience while Brad, Justice, Stevie Y and Steven R have started and been running the Edmonton .NET User Group. This series will not even be comparable to the nAnt Series (all 8 parts) by JP Boodhoo, but I gotta share what little knowledge and experience I have.I'm going to tackle this in a number of posts that cover the following subjects:The InspirationRunning with the Right CrowdKnowing and Meeting Your MarketHaving the Right SetupLocationContent, Content, ContentKeeping the Ball RollingExtending Your ReachThese are my initial thoughts so we'll see if...

Who would ever have thought that that a post titled like this one would have the possibility of evoking thoughts of hockey? If this is what you thought, then shame on you! Why wouldn't you think of the upcoming Edmug meeting? In the case of June, why didn't you think of the TWO upcoming Edmug meetings?You read right folks we're having two great events during June! On June 27th at 5:30pm Edmug will be hosting Jean-Luc David who will be presenting a 200/300 Level talk on Atlas/Ajax. Having seen Jean-Luc's voracious appetite for Montreal Smoked...

Hacknot posted a comprehensive writeup on the traits, skills and requirements of a Technical Lead. As a Technical Lead the 19 items listed all hit home. Some are things that I consciously have thought about in my work environment. Others, like Mistake #18: Failing to demonstrate compassion, I've thought about repeatedly in my personal life, but I've not thought about the impact and consequences of applying this to work.This post is the authority on how to approach leading a team of technical people. Read it, absorb it, and continually return to it and I think you...

According to Rob, if I'm not posting about my schedule for TechEd I'm a nobody. I'll have you know Rob that my mommy says I'm a somebody! And if you don't believe that I'll make you sit on the floor of the cab next time! Take that VB boy! ;)I'm the Igloo Coder and I know that my week here in Edmonton will be much more fun that getting geeky at TechEd, or swag from TechEd, or going to Fenway Park, or getting pissed in some different city, or telling more people about Bovine Artificial Insemination techniques....

Although I'm not using TFS (I hope to be very soon), these Sidekick products (Version Control and MS Build) by Attrice look very interesting. From what I can tell on the website both products appear to be free for use in both commercial and non-commercial situations. They even have the source code available if you want it. Check out the blog and subscribe to the rss to be notified of releases.I'm the Igloo Coder and my sidekick is out to lunch.