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This weekend I had the honor and privileged to attend the Grand Rapids GiveCamp in lovely Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Roughly 100 developers, designers and other technical professionals graciously gave their time and energy to help 25 worthy charities. Work was done on projects ranging from updating outdated websites to building databases to track donors.

I must make a confession here… To be honest I was very hesitant to go.  I think like many developers I have a great fear of coding in public. In the safe confines of the cube jungles you are comfortable and safe. In a public setting being sat down at a table with a room full of coders was down terrifying to me. I was terrified that I would be found out as a phony, an incompetent programmer and *gasp* a newb in comparison to everyone else.

But I felt a calling on myself to take the chance and do some good. Much of what I can directly account for to my recent reading of Joyce Meyer’s  book “A Love Revolution”. This book has really inspired me to open up and give to those in need.

Anyhoo… enough of my emotional outpouring lets get back to to #GRGiveCamp

I was assigned to do updates to some surveys and data collection tools that the Volunteer Center of Greater Kalamazoo had. I may be biased but I think we had the most awesome kick-ass team with my fellow teammates @mattsonlyattack and @kalpers.

We worked with the ASP.Net MVC Framework and Drupal to get our project done. It was very fun as I have wanted to learn MVC but have yet had the chance to sit down and dig in. I got to be tossed into the deep end and work my way through it. In 2 days of programming I managed to grok a lot and I feel very comfortable that I could safely do MVC work now.

It was an amazing time and one I will not soon forget.  Thank you Chris Woodruff (@cwoodruff) and all the crew that organized this. I feel so energized and happy knowing I did some good and made a difference in this world!

Today I possed the following on Twitter.

“Question of the day: How is the tech job market down south, like nashville, knoxville, atlanta?”

It looks like the consensus is that the technology market is limited in the south like much of the country.

It’s beginning to look a lot like conference season. Everywhere you go…..

Well folks the technology conference and computer events are coming upon us. Many events are in planning and several have been officially announced.

Here is just a short list of officially announced events and links to their websites. Save this link if you want. As I hear of new events I’ll make sure to update this blog post to add them.  Most of these events are in the “Heartland District” as defined by Microsoft which includes Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. Being that I live close to Indiana I have added events in that area as well.

UPDATE: 02/27/2009 - Added prices for events, Kalamazoo X Conference and Atlanta Code Camp.
UPDATE: 04/05/2009 - Added Lansing, Ann Arbor and Cleveland Day of .Net.
UPDATE: 05/05/2009 - Added Chicago Code Camp

March 2009

Atlanta Code Camp 2009 - Lawrenceville, GA - March 14th, 2009 (Free)

April 2009

West Michigan .NET University - Grand Rapids, MI - April 4th, 2009 (Free)

Central Ohio Day of .Net - Wilmington, OH - April 18th, 2009 (Free)

Kalamazoo X Conference - Kalamazoo, MI - April 25th, 2009 (Free)

May 2009

IndyCodeCamp - Indianapolis, IN - May 16th, 2009 (Free)

Chicago Code Camp - Grayslake, IL - May 30th, 2009 (Free)

June 2009

CodeStock - Knoxville, TN - June 26th - 27th, 2009 ($25.00)

July 2009

NO EVENTS

August 2009

Lansing Day of .Net - Lansing, MI - August 1st, 2009 (Free)

DevLink - Nashville, TN - August 13th - 15th, 2009 ($75.00)

September 2009

NO EVENTS

October 2009

IndyTechFest - Indianapolis, IN - October ??, 2009 (Free)

Ann Arbor Day of .Net - Ann Arbor, MI - October ??, 2009 (Free)

November 2009

NO EVENTS

Unannounced Events - Expected to be held this year but date unknown
Cleveland Day of .Net - Cleveland, OH (Free)

David Giard has posted another one of his super great video interviews on his blog. David does an amazing job and I find the interviews really, really interesting and inciteful! So without further ado go over and check out Brian Prince on Working for Microsoft.

Another excellent interview David. Keep up the great work!

How did you get started in software development?

I figured I’d join in and do the Mike Eaton Challenge and post my history as a techie…

How old were you when you started programming?

Oh I was about 10 or 11 I guess when I started programming.

How did you get started in programming?

My family had an Epson 286 12Mhz w/ 4mb of ram and MS-Dos 3.22. I used to play a game called MathBlaster(tm). The original version was writing in gwbasic. You had to start the gwbasic interpreter then stick in the mathblaster game disc and type run “color” to start the color version of the game.  Occasionally we would mess up and mis-type this and got error messages. Finally one day I found the manual for GWBasic and was introduced to all this code and started trying sample code.

What was your first language?

GW-Basic 3.x originally but quickly switched over to QBasic and later to PowerBasic.

What was the first real program you wrote?

I guess my first real program was at my first job. Basically a vb6 app the parses xml files and generates web surveys from it. It builds the HTML/ASP, Javascript verification and SQL table definitions.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

GWBasic, QBasic, PowerBasic, Visual Basic 6.0, VB.Net, C, C++, C#, PHP, Perl, T-SQL, Javascript and a tiny bit of Cobol

What was your first professional programming gig?

Programmer at Corporate Research International.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Most definitely. I think the biggest thing was that I believed that the market in the area was larger than it really was. While there are plenty of “IT” jobs there really isn’t that much programming work around. I would have done a few internships and spent more time networking to get my name out there when I started to search for programming jobs. It would have made my job searching a lot easier.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Don’t get too focused on specific technologies or tools. You can always learn a new technology within a short period of time. It’s more important to practice methodology and learning how to solve problems. I’ve seen too many “programmers” come and go that have an impressive list of technologies and/or tools on their resume but struggle to solve basic problems.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?

Hmm.. I guess I would say the most fun I’ve had programming was early on when I first started programming. I used to create all sorts of silly basic programs on that old 286 machine. I made banking software where floppy discs were atm cards. I created the system to control a submarine. I build the software that would automate and control Jurassic Park. I even setup a serial port connection to a 386 laptop and created a simple web server and browser to simulate the internet before my family ever got online.