In response to a great conversation I had with a friend, I just wanted to share a quote that I read in the latest issue of Psychology Today. The article focused on the concept of late bloomers in different fields of work. This quote is very similar to statements that I make in my courses:

“The moment we believe success is determined by an ingrained level of ability, as opposed to resilience and hard work, we will be brittle in the face of adversity”

Develop With Passion!!

We finished up our stay in the UK today and left from the wonderful home we had been staying in, in Broadstairs to head onto the European leg of our tour!!

The plan was to drop off our rental vehicle, catch the ferry to Calais and then finally catch the trains that eventually would lead us to Brussels so that I could do the Meet And Greet tonight!!

Well, as great as the plan sounded, we missed the last train to Brussels and so we now have to spend the night in Calais!!

Tomorrow we will head off in the morning and make our way towards Dusseldorf. I apologize to all of the people I will not be able to meet tonight!!

Bonne nuit!!

Michel Grootjans has very kindly organized a meet and greet social in Brussels for this coming Saturday the 20th of September.

It is going a be a very informal get together where there will hopefully be an opportunity to partake in lots of interesting conversations.

The venue is here: ⁃ Sint-Gorikshallen: Sint-Goriksplein 1, 1000 Brussel and we are going to kick things off at around 9:00PM.

If you are in and around the area, please stop by as I am sure that it will be a great evening.

From Brussels the next stop will be Dusseldorf for the next session of the Nothin But .Net bootcamp!!

Develop With Passion!!

Sorry for the delay in response about this one. You can now feel free to post comments to the posts without receiving errors!!

Develop With Passion!!

I am currently in the midst of reading an amazing book titled Lead Like Jesus. I just read a great paragraph that I feel called to share:

 

"Acting out of pride is like trying to blow up a balloon with a hole in it. It is lonely business requiring consistent effort with only temporary results that never satisfy or please anyone. Think of a time when you have blew up a balloon and there was a hole in it, and you will have a good mental image of what happens when you put your self-esteem in your performance and the opinions of others."

 

Currently I am only 1/4 way through the book, but I am already aware of the fact that the book is going to have a tremendous impact on me!!

 

Develop With Passion!!

I often talk with people about the many great life lessons that I have learned from reading the Bible. There is one verse in particular that I share with people when it comes to my attitude toward work. I personally believe that this verse has been something that has always allowed me to receive amazing satisfaction from the jobs I have been blessed to receive. The verse is Colossians 3:23 - 24:

"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving."

Develop With Passion

Apparently my plan of posting the top entries for the contest has been delayed a little. There have been plenty of awesome entries received (they are all great). Look for the top 5 entries to be posted next week, and the voting will begin. Thank you to all who have submitted entries, your stories are truly awesome!! Develop With Passion!!

Joel asked me to give my response to the How Did I Get Started in Dev meme so here it goes!!

How old were you when you first started in programming?

When I was 8 years old my Dad bought me a Beeb. Along with the computer I was also given a book on the BASIC language. I read the book and wrote computer programs on the computer for a whole year (I guess you can tell the geeks early on!!). Amazingly after that year of coding, I did not touch a computer again (for productive reasons) until I was back in school at the age of 20!!

How did you get started in programming?

I already stated above that I had the year of coding from 8yrs old - 9yrs old. What was I doing between 9 and 20? Video games, sports, goofing around. you name it. My wife and I got married at the tender age of 18, only a couple of months after high school graduation. For the next 1.5 years after graduation my wife and I worked in a family Dollar Store. I could not stand the job, and it was a chore to get up in the morning and feel fired up about what I was going to do that day at work. After one particularly nasty incident in the store I sat down and prayed and God told me that this was not His plan for what I was to do with my life. Some of my friends had decided to go straight from school into computer science programs at local and remote universities. I started picking their brains about some of the stuff they were doing. I got interested and decided that I should go back to school to study programming. Unfortunately, I goofed off a little too much in grade 12 and did pretty poorly in a lot of key subjects. So at the age of 19 I went back to high school to redo the core. As an aside, I was on honor roll from grades 9-11, so I knew that it was just a matter of me focusing and doing the job properly. After re-graduating, I applied at a local college in a 2 year technology program that would allow me to transfer into a computer science program. This is truly where I started to get into programming!!

What was your first programming language?

BASIC.

What was the first real program you wrote?

At the age of 9 I wrote a pong game. I was so thrilled with the end result, even if the graphics were nothing to write home about. The sense of accomplishment and the ability to express creativity in code were things that remained with me even when I took the long break from software.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

C++,Assembler,VB,VB.Net,C#,JavaScript,Ruby,Boo,PL-SQL,T-SQL,Open VMS

What was your first professional programming gig?

Working in a student records administration office at Medicine Hat College, working against an mainframe system using Open VMS.

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

Definitely. In reality, I would have most likely not taken the break and carried on learning programming between the ages of 9 and 20.

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

One thing that has helped me maintain satisfaction and success in this profession is quite simple. Always make sure you are having fun. Don't get caught up in meaningless chases to be better than person X. If you can acknowledge that you will never know it all, and that there is always someone who knows more than you do, you open yourself up to chart your own course for how you navigate your career path. Making decisions that are actually right for you, not because you "think" you need to do it. When I look back to when I first started to right now, there is not a single point along the way where I can say that I was not having an absolute blast doing what I was doing. Even when I was not using agile methodologies, or big into unit testing, I put a high priority on having fun and exercising the creative nature of the work that we do!! Keep it fun, and the rest will follow. For the Christian developers out there you may also appreciate these words from the bible, that I read a looooong time ago and have always kept close to my heart:

What's the most fun you've ever had programming?

My entire career has been an absolute blast. I have to say that doing the Nothin But .Net courses and being able to be a catalyst for the growth and reignition of other peoples careers has been a blessing and an opportunity that has resulted in one of the most satisfying experiences for me. Being able to say that I am having a positive impact on the professional as well as personal lives of others is something that cannot be quantified!!

Who am I calling out?

Mo Khan

Sean Feldman

Justice Gray

Joey Beninghove

Scott Cowan

When I published the site I forgot about all of the links that I would be breaking to the blog that pointed at http://www.jpboodhoo.com/blog. After a comment from someone who had done a lot of linking I thought about the quickest thing I could do to fix the problem. Even though the site is built on System.Web.MVC, I thought that since all of the links would point at www.jpboodhoo.com/blog. I just tweaked IIS instead of adding in a new route (KISS).

I created a blog folder under the main directory for the web site. The folder itself was empty. Then in IIS I went to the properties for the blog folder and set it up as follows:

This is just a simple redirection, that ensures (using the simplest way possible) that all old requests, trackbacks, links etc will get pointed at the new resources that are now rooted at:

http://blog.jpboodhoo.com

 

Develop With Passion

It just takes a moment and one offering of $250 to transform the life of a child with the aid of the Smile Train.

Check out the site and see the difference that you could make in the life of a child in need!!

For months now I have been telling people that I was going to be launching a full blown web site. With the amount of work I had taken on, it kept getting placed on the backburner. I finally decided to delegate the task to someone else. With a little help (and by little I mean he did absolutely everything!!) from Mo, the site was built in a week. I just deployed it last night!!

Go to: http://www.jpboodhoo.com to view the site. Click around and you will be able to find out more about the things I am currently doing, information on the Nothin But. Net developer bootcamp and all sorts of other interesting tidbits. There are a couple of pages that are not currently active as the target web server does not have a SQL Server database installed yet. These pages are mostly dealing with viewing the feedback from previous courses as well as photo albums of the prior courses.

Couple of interesting points about the site:

• Built with:
  • ASP .Net MVC
  • Castle Windsor
  • NHibernate
  • Log4Net
  • SQL Server
  • CSS
• Source for the site will be released within the next couple of months (to be used as a learning tool for other developers)
• Site Design By Stuart Knox (an incredible web designer)

Stay tuned as over the next couple of months there will be exciting new content that will be released!!

Please let me know if there are things that you would like to see on the site going forward.

Develop With Passion!!

In order to not steal any thunder from the post, the title along details my sentiments about why so many people miss the mark on truly achieving their dreams. If you have not yet started reading his blog, Tim Ferris shares a lot of his own personal experiments with lifestyle tweaks that allow him to live a much "richer" life than most will ever experience.

None of this is out of your reach, and everyone has their own definition of what living a rich life means to them. If you can't say that you are currently living the life you dreamed about, only you can do something about it. I had to ask for God's guidance and be obedient to His direction, as well as take risks that seemed impossible to me to start truly living the life that my wife and I dreamed about when we first got married 12 years ago.

Please take the time to read the post titled Why Bigger Goals = Less Competition, and subscribe to the blog already!!

For those of you who are tuned to this blog hoping to see more technical content, you are going to have to be more patient. As currently I am much more focused on empowering people with respect to their thinking on how to "achieve childhood dreams".

Live and Develop With Passion!!

My family and I are big proponents of lifestyle design. I was unfamiliar with the term until I started reading the great blog of Mr. Tim Ferris.

I posted a while ago about how the Lord had prompted us to give away all of our material possessions!! Save for a few bags of clothing and some irreplaceable childhood mementos of the kids, we are officially a 100% mobile family.

For the last 2 years my family and I have been doing a lot of traveling. For the other 10 years of our marriage we did zero!! This has been a large and much welcomed change for us, and it was one of the items that we had on our original "big dream list".

Unfortunately, a large majority of the travel consisted of business related trips that left me with little time to enjoy the places that we were all visiting. My wife and I decided early on in our marriage that we would always make a commitment to travel as a family. I can count on one hand the number of times in my entire career that I have ever had to travel without my family, and all of those times were due to circumstances that were beyond our control. So though we have been traveling as a family, I can't say that I have been able to enjoy the locations as much as they have, thankfully this has been improving over the last couple of trips and is about to undertake a major overhaul!!

My wife and I have always felt the same about enjoying life one day at a time, and not just waiting for the good stuff when I get to "retirement". We want our kids to see that the world is a phenomenal place with lots of little adventures that can be taken all the time. To that end, tomorrow my family and I will be the leaving our "comfort zone" of a stable home and known environment, to hit the open road and travel the world for the next 6 months - 1 year!! We have several key places that we want to hit on our journey, but we are keeping our options open and letting the Lord direct us in the location he wants us to go.

I feel confident that all of the traveling we have been doing these past 2 years was to prepare us for this time. We are looking forward to be able to grow even stronger as a family unit, while also trusting in the Lord to help us meet our needs as we go about our travels. Initially we thought that Austin was the place that we were going to end up. At this time, we do not feel that it is the place. We want to use this journey as an opportunity for us to see new places, meet new people, and be a blessing to anyone the Lord puts in our path along our travels. As well, as potentially open our eyes to a place that we can eventually establish roots in.

What about work? I decided to bite the bullet and offer my current client the ability for me to work remotely in lieu of several months of consulting fees. They are a startup company with a potentially awesome product that just needs some time to grow their legs. I have a vested interest in seeing this thing succeed, so I will continue to do my part in a completely remote fashion. I have been working on my own for the last year and am hoping to conclude this project by the end of the year so that when we have completed our travels, I will be able to reconnect with a team that is in need of an extra developer!! This means that I am purposefully taking a hit so that I can enjoy the experience of being on the open road. There will only be a month in the next 6 months that will be a pure vacation month. The rest of my schedule should look as follows:

• 5:30AM - Wake up and work out
• 7:30AM - Start work, complete one of my most important tasks of the day
• 11:00AM - Check email once
• 11:20AM - Lunch
• 11:50AM - 2:30PM - Complete work day

At 2:30PM each day I will connect with my family and we will explore whatever location we happen to be in. I am working on a condensed schedule, as an emphasis on lifestyle design draws me away from the typical 9-5 schedule. It may take me a little longer to get my responsibilities completed, but the journey will be so much more rewarding!!

Of course, I am keeping myself open to the option of being able to work with other teams in an ad-hoc nature as we progress through our travels. Which reminds me!! In the end of October timeframe, if you happen to know of a company that would be willing to have a good remote resource available at a steal of a rate, get in contact with me!!

So far, the places that we know we are visiting are as follows:

• Vancouver
• San Francisco
• San Diego
• Panama City Beach
• Orlando
• Domican Repuplic
• England
• Dusseldorf, Germany
• Paris,France
• Las Vegas

Places that we would also like to visit during this time:

• Greece
• Turks and Caicos
• Scotland
• Rome

We head out tomorrow in the family van, and will be driving as much as we can while we are in the US and Canada. While in Europe we are going to try to exercise the train infrastructure as much as possible.

At this point we actually have no idea where our travels will ultimately take us, but we are all approaching this trip with a great deal of anticipation.

What is my point to all of this? 3 years ago I would not have dreamed of orchestrating this kind of endeavor. Where I am sitting today, I understand the importance of taking the time to live "now". In the last couple of months, our family goals have once again shifted, and my wife and I are once again "dreaming big" to see where we want to take our family. If we were not willing to "give it all up" in pursuit of a bigger dream that we all share as a family, we would easily be able to sink into a comfortable, known, safe lifestyle that would not really challenge us as a family. I have done it before on my blog and I am going to do it again now. Read the following books/resources:

• The Dream Giver
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
• Tim Ferris
• The Purpose Driven Life
• The Greatness Guide
• The Prayer of Jabez

After reading through the above resources ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I really want to achieve out of life?
• What legacy do I want to leave for my kids?
• What legacy do I want to leave for others?
• What am I currently trying to handle that I should be forgetting about completely?
• What am I currently holding onto that could potentially hinder me from achieving my goals?
• What are my goals?
• How can I start truly "living" today?

Answering the questions above could be the start of a new path for your entire life. You have to be able to embrace the unknown with courage, remembering as the Prayer Of Jabez says, in the places you feel the most uncomfortable, is where the potential for growth is the greatest!!

Live and Develop With Passion!!!

Next week I am going to be issuing a contest that anyone who reads my blog will have the opportunity to participate in. Start spreading the word and tell your friends to keep an eye out, as the prizes are awesome!!

Develop With Passion

Was just listening to one of my favorite Newsboys songs this morning and I thought I would share some of the lyrics:

Stay strong
You are not lost
Come on and fix your eyes ahead
There's a new dawn to light our day, our day
We've gotta stay strong
You and I run
For the prize that lies ahead
We've come too far to lose our way, our way

Get up, there's further to go
Get up, there's more to be done
Get up, this witness is sure
Get up, this race can be won
This race can be won

 

Good Advice if you ask me!!

Develop With Passion!!

Hot on the heels of the Toronto course completion, one of the attendees (Michael Sevestre) just emailed me with a small update that fixes the issue on trying to reapply the macro to the name of the context when it is now inheriting from a base context class.

Thanks Michael, it is greatly appreciated!!

The update is below:

Imports System

Imports System.Windows.Forms
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports System.Diagnostics

Public Module CodeEditor

    Public Sub ReplaceSpacesInTestNameWithUnderscores()
        If DTE.ActiveDocument Is Nothing Then Return
        Dim wrCS As Boolean = DTE.Properties("TextEditor", "CSharp").Item("WordWrap").Value

        Try
            DTE.Properties("TextEditor", "CSharp").Item("WordWrap").Value = False
            Dim selection As TextSelection = CType(DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection(), EnvDTE.TextSelection)
            Dim index As Integer

            selection.SelectLine()
            If selection.Text = "" Then Return

            Dim methodIndex As Integer = selection.Text.IndexOf("public void ")
            Dim classIndex As Integer = selection.Text.IndexOf("public class ")
            Dim implementIndex As Integer = selection.Text.IndexOf(":")

            If (methodIndex < 0 AndAlso classIndex < 0) Then Return

            index = CType(IIf(methodIndex >= 0, methodIndex, classIndex), Integer)

            Dim prefix As String = CType(IIf(methodIndex >= 0, "public void ", "public class "), String)
            Dim whiteSpace As String = selection.Text.Substring(0, index)
            prefix = whiteSpace + prefix

            Dim description As String = selection.Text.Replace(prefix, String.Empty)

            'Find the ":" at the end of the line if defines
            Dim suffix As String = String.Empty
            If (implementIndex >= 0) Then
                suffix = selection.Text.Substring(implementIndex).Trim()
                description = description.Replace(suffix, String.Empty)
                suffix = String.Format(" {0}", suffix)
            End If

            description = description.Trim
            Dim text As String = prefix + description.Replace(" ", "_").Replace("'", "_") + suffix + vbCrLf
            selection.Delete()
            selection.Insert(text)
            selection.LineUp()
            selection.LineUp()
            selection.SelectLine()
            If selection.Text.Trim = "{" Or selection.Text.Trim = "}" Or selection.Text.Trim = "" Then
                If selection.Text.Trim = "{" Or selection.Text.Trim = "}" Then
                    selection.Insert(selection.Text.Replace(vbCrLf, "") + vbCrLf)
                ElseIf selection.Text.Trim = "" Then
                    selection.Delete()
                End If
            End If         
            selection.EndOfLine()
        Catch ex As Exception
            MsgBox(ex.Message)
        Finally
            DTE.Properties("TextEditor", "CSharp").Item("WordWrap").Value = wrCS
        End Try
    End Sub
End Module

Just flew in yesterday afternoon from an amazing week and a half in Toronto. This was one of the first trips in a while that my wife and I went without the kids! They had a great time hanging out with both sets of Grandparents.

We flew into Toronto last Wednesday (the 14th) and we spent most of the day just walking around Toronto trying to get a feel for the place. This was my first time back to Toronto in 15 years and my wifes first time there ever!!

On Thursday I jumped into DevTeach to give 2 presentations :

• Applied Domain Driven Design
• Generics - They're not just about collections

The feedback from the sessions was awesome, and I got to spend some time catching up with people I have not talked to in a while.

On Friday, I spent the day pair presenting with Scott for the post-con workshop on Behavior Driven Development. I feel like the workshop went well, lots of lessons learned, but each course only gets better!! That same evening my wife and I went to "Medieval Times"!!! I purchased the Royalty package, so we got to sit right in the front row to witness all the action up close. In reality, the seating is laid out so well that you will be able to get a good viewpoint from any part of the arena. It was an absolute blast. The food was amazing, and the presentation itself was fabulous. We have made it a point to now try and see Medieval Times in each location where it is actually delivered (which is only a small set of locations)!!!

Saturday we spent the day walking and shopping. Checking out markets was fun, and eating in restaurants without the kids running around our feet was quite a surreal experience!!

On Sunday the 18th we left our hotel room at 8:00AM in the morning to go and spend the day taking a guided tour of Niagara Falls. This was definitely an unforgettable experience. Taking part in the Maid of the Mist tour is a memory that I am sure will be etched into both of our minds forever. We also got to spend a little bit of time checking out Clifton Hills, which had lots of fun amusement rides and shops!! The day finished off with a guided wine tasting at a local vineyard.

The week of the 19th was an extremely busy week, as I was delivering another Nothin But .Net Course at the Marriott Bloor Yorkville!! It was myself and 11 other attendees, and the week was an absolute blast. The amount of information that we managed to cover was staggering and I am sure that everyone involved had a great time!! One of the highlights of the week was when my wife came in and presented the class with T - Shirts that said the following on the front:

"I survived Jean-Paul Boodhoo's .Net Bootcamp!!!"

Going forward, we are going to absolutely have to make sure that everyone gets a T-Shirt!!

We are now back in Calgary, we have been reunited with the kids, and I have a couple of weeks of heads down crazy codin to do before the next course in Vancouver.

God Bless and,

Develop With Passion!!

Well, I guess I'll know for next time how many days it takes for me to get 79 responses for a freebie giveaway!! The 3 winners just got sent their amazon gift credits. And yes, the 79th email just came in a couple of hours ago!!

Tell your friends, tell your coworkers. This is far from the last freebie of the quarter!!

Develop with Passion!!

Seeing the response from the Dream Giver giveaway, I thought I would try something a little bit different in an effort to get people to potentially look at updating their book library.

Self education is an absolute must if you want to remain current in this industry, and IMHO there is no better resource that blogs and a couple of books to help you hit the ground running.

If you are feeling like your book library could use a bit of an upgrade then email me. I will issue an $70 Amazon gift card to the:

• 77th, 78th, and 79th respondents

Develop With Passion!!

Everyone who knows me will know that I can tend to ramble on about the topic of this post. I am a big proponent of trying to encourage people to stretch and really push to achieve dreams that they have identified that they want to see come to fruition.

I could ramble on about this topic and share my own thoughts and ideas with respect to how I personally went about making dreams a reality for myself and my family; instead I would like to share a video presentation from an amazing computer science professor named Randy Pausch.

I can't stress enough the importance of outlook with respect to approaching every situation. This man is dying of pancreatic cancer and he still has a passion and fire that he wants to use to light up the lives of the people that he comes into contact with.

Though I don't agree with all of the points that he makes in the video, the man is truly an inspirational teacher, and the life lessons he has learned to get to where he is are truly awesome.

I have to say a special thanks to Perry Neal for taking the time to send me the link. I watched the video on my second monitor at work, and then went home that same evening and watched it again with my wife.

Three points in the video really stuck a chord with me and I hope they will resonate with you long after you watch the video:

• Brick walls are not only there to make us realize how much we want to achieve a goal, they are also there to keep out the others who are not willing to break through to their achievements.
• You have to decide whether you are a Tigger or an Eeyore. Your outlook on life and the situations that you are placed in will greatly affect the outcome and potential realization of your own dreams.
• As someone who wants to impact kids with respect to getting them fired up about potential careers in software, the ALICE program looks like a phenomenal resource.

This video is an absolute must see, and I think you could potentially look at transforming your life if you allow some of the ideas and techniques this man is sharing to permeate your very core!!

Enjoy.

I was just listening to one of my favorite podcasts (sorry, not anything remotely technical) and the title for the newest track caught my eye as it is definitely something that I try to encourage everyone to do:

The title of the mix is Press on with the following description:

Press on to start, press on to keep from stopping

Good advice for anyone who wants to find satisfaction in what they do.

Develop With Passion!!

This past Alt.Net experience was amazing as always. I am continually blown away by the level of passion that is exhibited by all attendees. Every single person in attendance comes ready to share and learn.

I enjoyed talking with a lot of new faces and spending (too short) time with friends that I have not seen for a while.

It is particularly awesome for me to see the growth that is occurring in people as I reconnect with them after 1 year of not chatting with them. It is truly amazing the distance a person can travel with a bit of focus and determination.

Even though the conference was going on, I got to spend a considerable amount of time with my family also. On the evening of the second night, we went out to go and see the Forbidden Kingdom with Jackie Chan and Jet Li. The movie was excellent, and served as a great way to break up the Alt .Net event for me.

If you are thinking about attending an Alt.Net event, I encourage you to not hesitate to attend/organize one in your local area. This is not a community of people who think they are better, it is a community of people who are continually trying to become better software developers. The ideas and thoughts are an aggregate of concepts that are not yet considered mainstream by a majority of the .Net community. It is particularly encouraging for me to see the increased level of Microsoft involvement at each successive Alt .Net event.

I made a comment that it was particularly interesting that the venue (Digipen) happens to be one of the leaders in churning out top quality innovative game developers. The perfect place to host a group of people who are striving for innovation and creativity with respect to problem solving in the software realm.

Hopefully I will see some of you at an Alt .Net event in the future!!

Develop with Passion!!