Nerd Film Festival

One of the challenges of being a software developer is keeping up with new technology.  I can remember being in High School and thinking, “as soon as I maser C++, I’ll be set!”.  Boy was I ever wrong.  Then came Java.  Then came the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Php) stack.  Then came the Microsoft .Net Stack (Sql Server, IIS, C#, ASP.Net).  No matter how hard you try to specialize and therefore minimize your problem space, there will always be too many technologies to do a deep dive on.

Though I dabble in everything, the .Net Framework is definitely my most familiar set of tools.  To keep up to date, I have a sizeable set of web sites, forums, blogs, community events, mailing lists, podcasts, and books that I review.  Perhaps the most fun source of knowledge is the Microsoft conferences.  Microsoft holds two a year.  In November they hold the Professional Developers Conference (PDC).  It covers the breadth of options for developing applications on Microsoft’s platforms.  In March, the company holds its MIX conference.  This one is focused primarily on web development.  This includes cloud offerings, web development, mobile development, and design.

Actually attending these conferences is outside of my budget.  However, Microsoft posts the video of all of the presentations on the conference web site.  It is now becoming a tradition for me to wait until the Friday after the conference, download the videos of interest, and then burn them off to DVD.  The nerd inside of me feels like a kid in a candy store.  There are some many exciting new technologies to learn and play with.  But, then the pragmatist in me dampens my enthusiasm.  With each successive conference, the number of videos of interest grows.  For this year’s Mix conference, there were 40 videos at 1 hour a piece.  I’d need a solid work week to make my way through all of them. Heck, it took me 2 hours just to filter the list and download the videos.  Sadly, I realize I will never make it through all of them.  But it will be fun and informative to try!