I am sure that some of our readers will see the title of this post and think that it is a bit strange. There actually is a story behind it. A lot of people do not understand the world that computer programmers live in. For those of you who use Junxure, it is pretty easy to use the program and I hope we have done a pretty good job at hiding the complexity. If you could peek into our world, you would see that Junxure is actually a blend of technologies, all working together to allow you to run your practice in the most efficient manner.
All of these technologies allow us to do some incredible things, but at the same time they are very complicated and forever evolving. The challenge for me and our development staff is how do we keep up with the technology and it’s ever changing status. The problem of keeping up is not unique to the programmers who develop Junxure, it is a universal problem. To help developers keep up with the changes, Microsoft has put together a team of people whose main purpose is to spread the news of what is new, what is coming, and how do you use these technologies. Additionally, just like we at Junxure listen to our users to find out what is working and what need to be added or changed, they listen and meet with many of their users to do the same thing.
They do this via a variety of ways, and one of them is something that is called “Code Camp”. This weekend Microsoft, Infragistics and a host of other companies hosted a “Code Camp” and they were able to have it at a local community college. Orlando Code Camp This Saturday, they put together 50 speakers, and 65 sessions designed to help developers use the technology. There we sessions on Dot Net Nuke, Sharepoint, Data Services, Sql Programming, Programmer related management and development stuff, The Dotnet Framework, MVC and a whole bunch of other stuff. You can click the link above if you are really interested in the details.
So if you have gotten this far in the post, then you are probably asking yourself what the title “Hanselman of the East” has to do with all of this. We it all goes back to a maintenance man at a theater in Fort Lauderdale. You see, about 4 or 5 years ago, I went to another event that was hosted by Microsoft, and this event was at a theater. I arrived a a bit early and got a seat near the front. While they were setting up it looked like there where having trouble with the audio visual system and in walks a maintenance man wearing a hard had and a old leather tool belt.
I have to admit, I thought it was a bit funny seeing all of these highly trained Microsoft employees standing around while this maintenance man was called in to make it all work. He fiddled with some cables and settings a low and behold, as if a by magic, the Microsoft logo appears on the huge theater screen. Internally I had a bit of a chuckle thinking how the maintenance man saved the day. Then they said that they were going to get started. Much to my surprise, the same maintenance man goes to the front of the room and introduces himself as Russ Fustino, host of the, now world famous Russ’Tool Shed. Russ gave a fantastic presentation on how to program on what was then the new Visual Studio and some of it’s new features. Russ is one of the guys who helps us learn all of this new stuff. His discussion and demonstrations of the tools that are available to developers is top notch.
So again you are probably asking again “What does this have to do with Hanselman of the East”. Well there is another person who has devoted lot’s of his time to helping developers learn about technology, and his name is Scott Hanselman. Scott is very well known but mostly hangs out in the West, but he has a great reputation in this field. Many people when they think of great leaders in the area of Microsoft development they are can’t help but immediately think of these two guys, along with a slew of many others.
To give you an idea of how many people Russ has helped over the years, I’ll share a story about a session this weekend. Ryan Morgan was giving a presentation on Jquery, and a lady walked into the room and said she had some extra tickets to Russ’ TV show. There were about 40-50 people in that room, with many standing in the back of the room because of Ryan is an awesome presenter and everyone wanted to hear him. Anyway, when she said she had a few tickets to the show, one poor guy asks “Who is Russ Fustino?” The whole room went silent and almost in unison whole room cried out “WHO’S RUSS FUSTINO?” like they were so surprised that someone in this field, would not know who Russ is. The poor guy then had to listen as people began to say “EVERYONE KNOWS WHO RUSS IS.” He as probably feeling pretty bad by then, but that shows the impact that Russ has made on the developer community.
Overall it was a great weekend for the Junxure developers. We were able to fan out and cover a huge variety of topics and the knowledge that we gained will help us to make Junxure, Clientview and Junxure Mobile much better products.
So this is the end of the weekend and the Junxure developers have spent a couple of days reviewing our code, looking at things that we are working on and refining our road map. We topped it all off with a whole day at Code Camp, and now we are going to be heading back to work, fully charged, loaded with new ideas, and excited to get started using them.
Hopefully you now have a better appreciation of what we do behind the scenes to keep up to date on all of the current technology.
