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Excited to be speaking at Develop Denver

Coffee break at a conferenceI’m excited to be speaking at Develop Denver. This is a local conference with a wide variety of topics of interest to developers, designers and in general anyone who works in the interactive industry. From their website, they want to:

[bring] together developers, designers, strategists, and those looking to dive deeper into the interactive world for two days of hands on code & design talks.

I’ll be doing two presentations. The first is my talk on Amazon Machine Learning, which I’ve presented previously. The second is a lightning talk on the awk programming language. I’m excited to be presenting, but I’m also looking forward to interesting talks from other speakers, covering topics such as IoT, software development for the developing world, web scraping, APIs, oauth, software development, and hiring practices. (That list is tilted toward my interest in development–there’s plenty for everyone.)

If you’re able to join, it’s happening in about two weeks in downtown Denver (Oct 18-19 in the RiNo district). Here’s the link for tickets, and here’s the agenda.

Fifteen years

Birthday cakeWow. 15 years ago today I wrote my first post. Thank you for reading!

I’ve been blogging for longer than I’ve done any other activity in my life. Longer than any job, any romantic relationship, any hobby.

And I can’t see stopping. Sure, I may use other outlets, but I’m trying to keep the streak of no month going by without a post going (darn you, November 2011!). I think that writing is an essential part of software development and it’s been an essential part of my reflective process. I primarily blog for myself. But it is still fun when folks reach out to me and let me know my writing has helped them in some way. It’s also fun when I google a problem and realize that I’ve already written up an answer.

I encourage everyone I meet to blog. It is a fantastic way to accumulate credibility and expertise. (You never learn something as well as when you are trying to explain it to others.) It also gives me a chance to expound on some of my thoughts around jobs, business, and software development. I’m lucky that my work almost always is something interesting enough to write about, at least once a month. Maybe one of these days I’ll put together a ‘best of’ and make a PDF.

I also think it is important to blog at a place you control. Yes, Medium or Facebook make it easier to gain a following. But what they giveth, they can taketh away. I may only have limited engagement here on this blog, but what I write is mine and will never be anyone else’s.

Hard to believe that my blog will be able to drive next year. Again, thanks for reading.