Personal

Continue Learning, Write Down Goals, and you will Succeed!

Dennis Bottjer — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:39:27 GMT

For most of my life I’ve been a fan of goal settings. Furthermore, I usually like writing goals down. However, I must admit that although a fan, I have not remained consistently faithful to the practice year after year. I can tell you though that the practice does work. Sure it may sometimes take a little longer than planned. But the process of setting a goal, writing down, and then periodically checking progress is a good thing.

Last year I set a goal to read six books. The logic was simple. Surely, I could read at least one book every two months. At the end of 2009 here were the results:

Why is this Important?

To some a reading list of fifteen books may seem like a lot. To others laughable. I believe Teddy Roosevelt read a book per day. This blog post and list is not intend to gloat but to simply share a few key believes.

Software Development is a career where our skills become obsolete rapidly. So how do we stay valuable? We read about the latest technologies and never stop learning.

Wisdom beyond ones own experiences can be gained, to some degree, through the shared experiences of others. Remember, success leaves clues for us to follow.

It’s important to have an understanding of business environment, because many of, dare I say most of us, don’t design and build operating systems or development environments. Most of us develop software solutions for business users and they don’t speak GEEK!

Unexpected Find:

Secrets from a Creativity Coach – This book was a birthday present from my mother. The book was a quick read and a book I couldn’t put down. Any Geek that believes development is an expression on his/her creativity will find value in this book.

The Book Every SharePoint Developer Should Own!

Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Pro Developer)

Favorite Business Book:

The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Library Edition) - One of the core messages of this book is not work for work sake. Think of Office Space and the TPS Reports. How many employees are involved in creating, reviewing, approving, etc. those TPS reports. This book has value to the employee that wants streamline his / her workday and to the self-employed.

Should have read long, long, ago:

Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction – I’ve read bits and pieces of this book over the years but kept failing to read it cover-to-cover. This book is a cornerstone in good development fundamentals. I plan to review it again this year.

Share Your Recommendations:

If you are reading this and have any goal setting tips or experiences to share, please leave a comment.

Also, I am looking for some new reading material for 2010 so recommendations are welcome. :)

Kathryn Claire Bottjer (Kate) Arrives

dbottjer — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:02:52 GMT

On Monday 11/19/2007 @ 10:30 PM, after 2 hour and 45 minutes of pushing (ouch), Carrie gave birth to our first child. Kate was 7lbs 1 ounce and 17.5 inches long. We've posted some pictures on Shutterfly at http://katebottjer.shutterfly.com. Needless to say we had something special to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.

Going home.

Living On Tulsa Time

dbottjer — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 12:48:38 GMT

The last few months have quickly flew by. Carrie and I moved back to Tulsa, OK from Jacksonville, FL at the end of August. We are now settled into our new house and have been busy working on the nursery. Kate, our first child, is due on November 17th.

I really miss all my Florida friends and the strong Florida Developer Community but I am getting re-established in Tulsa. For Example, I accepted a position as Solution Architect with a local Microsoft Gold Partner, SpringPoint Technologies in late August. Essentially, I work for the Consulting Division of SpringPoint and we specialize in SharePoint, Workflow, ASP.NET, Smart Clients and CRM. I really love the work because one day I might be working on a project for an enterprise client and the next a small business.

Ruthless Interview

dbottjer — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:16:00 GMT

As many friends and colleagues know my wife and I are pregnant with our first child, a little girl. As a result we have decided to relocate to Tulsa, OK. Yes, we are heading to Tulsa to be near family. Most of my wife's family is from Tulsa and my parents relocated their several years ago for work. Anticipating this move I have been actively interviewing with many local companies.

Interviewing is always a stressful process. However, I couldn't believe the general tone of a third round interview I had tonight. The interview started off quite pleasant but quickly turned almost insulting as the technical questions began. First, I was asked to talk about my experiences with Scrum. Well I work for a major fortune 100 company in the financial sector that is slowly trying to implement an Agile Methodology. Unofficially, our team has been trying to use as many scrum principles as possible. However, waterfall is deeply engrained in our organization and many process just aren't flexible. As I began to describe what Scrum principles we have adopted the interviewer proceeded to tell me we're not practicing true Scrum. This is of course what I had already stated. My entire point being that we have been trying to adopt as many as the "best scrum practices" as we could possibly accommodate. It is a learning process for us. Large corporations do not just change direction overnight.

The next interviewer comment that took me off guard was his apparent lack of respect for the Microsoft MVP Program. He stated, "I have interviewed many MVP's and was not impressed." He said "...some seem technical but many are just good at answering questions and which was I?"

His opinion was supposedly not meant to offend however I did find it quite offensive for I am proud of my MVP Award. It hasn't gone to my head and by no means do I believe I am an expert in every ASP.NET, C#, etc. I do believe I am a good developer and have contributed much to the development community. Furthermore, I am friends with many fellow MVP's and I consider them to be good developers as well. His opinion seemed purely based on technical knowledge/memorization and fails to account for all the other valuable contributions MVP's make. The MVP award also recognizes those individuals that have helped mentor others and build communities.

I must admit at this point my mind and heart just weren't into the interview.

The final frustration point for me came when the interviewer seemed to indicate that correct "Enterprise" way to populate business objects with data was to use an ORM such as NHibernate. I certainly understand the value of mapping configs and pulling data from multiple sources to populate business objects that are independent from the data model however every decision has costs associated with it. I work in an "Enterprise" environment and we haven't made much use of ORM's. I would argue it depends on your requirements and many factors. If I am building a service that only needs to retrieve data from one database an active record pattern or simple data mapper would work just fine.

The point I'm trying to make is there are things we are all good at and things we are all bad at. When interviewing someone you can take the interview in a direction where the person seemingly doesn't know much by asking them essentially definitions. There are many features of .NET that I probably couldn't describe in great depth but I know what they are. I would go to MSDN read about the feature then use it. It seems to me like it is more important to learn how a candidate solves problems. Are they a creative thinker? Are they passionate?

Five Things You Don't Know About Me

dbottjer — Tue, 15 May 2007 21:32:00 GMT

Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me:

A while ago I was pinged to answer the five things you didn’t know about me question circulating the blogosphere. Anyway, I procrastinated but here are my answers.

1. I love animals. I grew up with Dogs and Cats. Currently I have 3 cats.

2. I’ve been playing guitar since I was 9 years old.

3. I was born and raised in New York. My family moved from NY to Tulsa, OK when I was a junior in High School.

4. I went to Space Camp when I was in 3^rd grade. It was the first time I ever went to “Sleep Away Camp” and needless to say my parents ended up spending the week in Orlando. (Living in New York at the time.)

5. I have an hour or so of flight time actually piloting a Cessna.

6. Bonus: My first computer was an IBM PC Jr.

I Tag: [Dave], [RoyAshbrook] and [ScottRoycraft]