Wednesday 11 January 2012 at 10:30 am
I’m one of those managers who believe your team being involved in ‘the community’ is of excellent benefit not just to their own personal growth but also the quality of software they produce; I also believe lack of recognition of this only leads to demotivate or worse - high staff turnover.
We have several schemes in-house to reward or compensate for personal time spent including reimbursement of expenses to ‘events’ and in the case of all-day attendance a day-in-lieu. I now don’t think this is enough to /encourage/ participation and contribution back to the community.
With this in mind I’ve been playing with the idea of introducing some kind of credits scheme for my team and the comment made on twitter seemed to spark some interest:
@Cranialstrain: Wonder if some kind of team credits scheme for community participation and contribution might fly at work (e.g. blogging/StackOverflow) :=/
I thought it might be good to crowd-source this idea into a more concrete proposal, perhaps one you could take to your company too?
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Monday 09 January 2012 at 4:14 pm
One of my commitments for 2012 is to present at user groups and conferences; although a regular coach at company workshops I had previously stayed clear of the public scene, so what's changed?
“Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone.”
— Robert Allen
So it's time to push this personal ambition along and with recent enthusiasm for FubuMVC it seems like the ideal opportunity to scratch this itch. Dates are not exhaustive but so far;
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Introduction to FubuMVC (alongside Mark Rendle & Simple.Data).
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Introduction to FubuMVC.
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NDC Oslo [crew only] (6-8 June 2012)
Feeling very humbled and privileged to be given the opportunity to 'crew' at NDC Oslo again this year, no speaking though.
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Introduction to FubuMVC.
If you run a usergroup and are interested in allowing me to speak about FubuMVC do shout 
Saturday 07 January 2012 at 7:00 pm
There is nothing worse when mixing business with pleasure or in this case - commercial priorities with open-source - than a battle between the heart and the mind; certainly that's the saddening feeling I have about Spark.
In the beginniing..
We started using #FubuMVC nearly six months ago and have never looked back; being somewhat senior I am fortunate to have the privilege (and confidence of my superiors) to make decisions about technical direction. I can say without hesitation that even if Razor support had existed we'd have pushed forward with Spark anyway and reviewed regularly to validate our decision.
I know this wouldn't hold true for many Software Houses but there is a significant amount of awesomeness at our company and this starts with not only a commitment to personal growth, exposure to technologies, but also a realization that we need to support the OSS community.
D-Day
Cutting a long story short the ultimate review day came for both FubuMVC and the other technologies we'd employed, sitting in the meeting room with the Technical Lead and CTO I wasn't nervous as I already knew where the problems lay and it wasn't with FubuMVC.
On the whole I'd loved every single day using Spark, it had been a breath of fresh air and a wonderful challenge to master a new engine and syntax, it even had me digging through the FubuMVC and Spark internals to understand it's behavior, it is in my humble opinion a winner in all regards but one. Intellisense.
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