Once again, my friend and former co-worker (I worked at his startup, OpenCola, during “The Bubble”) Cory Doctorow is holding the Canadian launch of his latest novel, For the Win.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb about the book:

In the virtual future, you must organize to survive

At any hour of the day or night, millions of people around the globe are engrossed in multiplayer online games, questing and battling to win virtual “gold,” jewels, and precious artifacts. Meanwhile, others seek to exploit this vast shadow economy, running electronic sweatshops in the world’s poorest countries, where countless “gold farmers,” bound to their work by abusive contracts and physical threats, harvest virtual treasure for their employers to sell to First World gamers who are willing to spend real money to skip straight to higher-level gameplay.

Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of “General Robotwalla.” In Shenzen, heart of China’s industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.

The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power—including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister’s people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once—a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.

Imbued with the same lively, subversive spirit and thrilling storytelling that made LITTLE BROTHER an international sensation, FOR THE WIN is a prophetic and inspiring call-to-arms for a new generation.

The event takes place tonight at 6:30 p.m. in the Merril Collection of the Lillian H. Smith building (a.k.a. “The Library”) at 239 College Street, just east of Spadina. Perhaps a post-launch visit to Caplansky’s is in order.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Here’s episode 2 of Developer Junior, the show where “Junior” the puppet (played by Brian Hogg of Hoggworks Studios) and I show kids how to make the most out of their technology. In this episode, Junior and I go Hollywood and make a quick little movie using Live Movie Maker, which runs on Windows and you can download for free.

In case you missed the previous Developer Junior episode, in which Junior and I build a video game using Kodu, you can watch it here.

Junior and I are headed to CP24’s studios tonight to do an interview with Amber Mac and Maurice Cacho on their show, Webnation, where we’ll be talking about Developer Junior, technology, kids and how they all fit together. If you’re in the Toronto area, tune in tonight to CP24 at 7:10 p.m. to catch our interview live; if you’re, you can see the interview online when they post it to the Webnation site.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Say “Uncle”!

This week on the Ignite Your Coding live webcast, we have a very special guest: Robert C. "Uncle Bob" Martin!

His business card may say “Robert C. Martin”, founder and CEO of the Object Mentor consulting firm, but we know and love him as “Uncle Bob”. He’s been coding since the Beatles broke up, and in that four-decade span, he literally wrote the books on agile and extreme programming as well as the letters UML, OOP and C++. Throughout the industry, he’s known as a champion of proper design, test-driven development and just plain writing good code. We’ll chat with Uncle Bob in this one-hour webcast, where we’ll talk about software craftsmanship, why it takes work and why it matters.

What’s Ignite Your Coding About?

Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!

How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask Richard
• To register for the webcast (it’s free), click here; you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast on Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific!

How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?

It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Our guest on Ignite Your Coding this week, Jeff Atwood, has certainly made his mark in the programming world with the Coding Horror blog as well as his project with Joel Spolsky, the online developer forum Stack Overflow (which in turn gave rise to the Server Fault and SuperUser forums). Join me and John Bristowe this Thursday as we chat with Jeff about Coding Horror, Stack Overflow, software development, fake plastic rock, P=NP and whatever topics you, the listener, want covered.

We’ll be chatting with Jeff live this Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific) online.

What’s Ignite Your Coding About?

Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!

How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask Richard
• To register for the webcast (it’s free), click here; you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast on Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific!

How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?

It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.

Who’s Coming Up on Ignite Your Coding?

• Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin on software craftsmanship

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Me and Bill Buxton at the MIX10 Attendee Party last Tuesday night.

There’s one reason I’m particularly excited about Windows Phone 7 Series. The radically reworked look and feel is the surest sign that the company is really beginning to understand design and is willing to start from scratch (a risky and pricey proposition) to get it right. It would appear from Microsoft’s Principal Researcher Bill Buxton’s interview in The Register that I’m not the only one who thinks this:

"We kinda changed the water that we drink, in the sense that all through the design community within the company we talk, and we have a common goal in terms of trying to bring a certain change of sensibility," he said.

"For me it’s not even about the phone, but what’s interesting is that it’s the first product in the company with critical mass that’s embraced this … it will have an impact on other parts of the company."

If (or better still, when) you start building Windows Phone applications – or hey, any kind of application — I hope that you’ll follow the spirit of “Metro” (the codename for the design philosophy behind Windows Phone 7) and keep it in mind. Yes, it’s absolutely important to know the Silverlight and XNA APIs as well as how to read the touch sensors, GPS, accelerometers and so on, but it’s just as important to design your applications around the people who’ll use them. That means understanding your users, how they’ll use what you’re making, knowing how to give them what they need as quickly and unobtrusively as possible and delighting them. Yes, “a pretty interface” is included in all that – and there’s research to suggest that beautiful interfaces work better –but looks are merely part of the design equation.

Some Design Sessions from MIX10

Want some interesting lunchtime viewing on design? Look no farther than these two videos.

The first is Bill Buxton’s MIX10 session, simply titled An Hour with Bill Buxton, a conversation about design:

Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in
WMV, WMV (High) or MP4 format.

If you haven’t the time to watch the video of Buxton’s presentation, check out this hit list of metaphors complied by Sharon Chan at Microsoft Pri0.

If you’re planning on getting into Windows Phone 7 design, you’re going to want to learn the “design language” – not a programming language, but the guiding principles and philosophies behind the new user experience – behind it. Here’s the MIX10 presentation on that topic, Designing Windows Phone 7 Series with Albert Shum, Michael Smuga and Chad Roberts:

Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in
WMV, WMV (High) or MP4 format.

A World Without Design

Here’s a little something extra for those of you who like to think about design and user experience:

I whipped up this graphic, modelling it after a poster I remember seeing many years ago. I can’t remember what it was for – a museum, art gallery or exhibit, perhaps? – but I remember thinking that it was right on the money. If you remember the original poster and what it was for, please let me know, either via email or the comments!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This week’s Ignite Your Coding podcast features Jeremy Miller, Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. In our one-hour webcast, my co-host John Bristowe and I will discuss a wide range of topics, from newer OSS efforts in the .NET developer community and how they’re trying to reduce friction, AAA-style mocking instead of record/replay mocking, the effective use extension methods for cleaner/readable/easier unit testing, jQuery magic, and many other topics.

In case you were wondering what Ignite Your Coding is all about: It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Jeremy Questions…

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask Glenn
• To register for the webcast (it’s free); you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast on Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern!

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Actually, from left to right, it’s me, Ward Bell of IdeaBlade and Microsoft’s Glenn Block, whom John Bristowe and I interviewed in the most recent Ignite Your Coding webcast. Ward and Glenn have forgotten more about building composite apps than I will ever learn. If you attended the “Building Composite Applications with WPF and Silverlight” session in my track at TechDays Canada 2009, you saw what was essentially Ward’s presentation; he’s the only reason I know anything about Prism.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m in Montreal at ConFoo, the “web techno conference” where both open source and Microsoft technologies are the topics. I did a presentation on ASP.NET MVC earlier this morning, and as I write this, I’m watching Mario Cardinal talk about REST. I’ve seen him do this presentation before, but I always enjoy watching his sessions; they feel more like techie conversations over coffee (or beer) than lectures.

You’re probably wondering what that pirate flag draped over the lectern is all about. I put that up there for my session to declare my allegiance. It’s a reference to the Pirate/Ninja personality spectrum, where:

• Ninjas prefer to work quietly in the background, while
• Pirates like to work flamboyantly, swashbuckling and yelling “Arrr!”

If you know me, you know where I fall on that spectrum.

(I also brought a goalie mask in case I needed to talk about JSON. Get it? Goalie mask? JSON?)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If it’s Thursday, it must be time for me and my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe to host another live Ignite Your Coding webcast!

This week’s guest is Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talk with him about building composite applications, design patterns, the “alphabet soup” of SOLID, DI and IoC and whatever questions you ask him.

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Glenn Questions…

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask Glenn
• To register for the webcast (it’s free) here, where you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast this afternoon at 2:00 p.m. Eastern!

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This Thursday, my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe and I will host another live Ignite Your Coding webcast, where we’ll interview another high-profile software developer and pass along some of your questions.

This week’s guest is Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talk with him about building composite applications, design patterns, the “alphabet soup” of SOLID, DI and IoC and whatever questions you ask him.

(We don’t have a photo of Glenn Block, but we do have the image to the right, which is the symbol for MEF – that’s Managed Extensibility Framework – which is one of Glenn’s projects. It’s a lucky coincidence that Glenn’s last name is also featured prominently in the image.)

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Glenn Questions…

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask Glenn
• To register for the webcast (it’s free) here, where you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast on Thursday at 2:00 p.m.!

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

What’s Ignite Your Coding All About, Anyway?

It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Image created by Chasis Tsevis.

Steve Jobs, Apple iCEO and one of the leaders of the Esteemed Competition, turns 55 today. Happy iBirthday, Steve!

If you want a big honkin’ alternate version of this mosaic, check this out.

It all starts next week on Thursday, March 4th: Ignite Your Coding, the live webcast where we interview some of the biggest brains in the industry, and then hand over the interview to you!

In Ignite Your Coding, my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe and I will talk to developers who’ve made their mark on the industry and ask them how they got started, what sorts of projects they’re working on, what interests them, where they see the industry heading, all with an eye towards helping you make sense of the changes happening in the world of software development. We’ll ask the questions for the first part, but then it’ll be your turn to ask them. The webcast will take place on Thursdays in March and April, and it won’t cost you a thing to catch them.

Our First Guest: Andy Hunt

Are you into agile programming? Andy Hunt co-authored the Manifesto. Does The Pragmatic Programmer occupy a special place on your bookshelf? (And really, it should.) Andy co-wrote that too. Have you ever coded using Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET MVC? Chances are you picked up some knowledge, either directly or indirectly, from a book published by Andy’s book publishing company, The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

We’re quite fortunate to have Andy as our first guest, and we’re looking forward to the interview! Our live webcast with Andy will take place on Thursday, March 4th at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific) and run for an hour. To catch the webcast, all you have to do is register – it’s free!

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

There are all sorts of books out there that talk about how to get the most of your programming tools, from IDEs to utilities to languages to frameworks to methodologies. But of all these tools, the most important tool is the one that’s largely ignored: your brain. Enter Andy’s latest book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, which I declared “My Favourite Geek Book of 2008”. There are many books and tools for refactoring your code; this one’s about refactoring your brain. First, it presents the brain in a way that a programmer can grasp:

…and then talks about the many ways you can refactor it:

• Taking advantage of R-mode (often called the “right brain” in pop psychology), which often gets ignored because of its non-linear, non-linguistic, unpredictable and even “artsy” nature. It’s actually an amazing problem-solver, so much that PT&L suggests that you should “lead with R-mode and follow with L-mode”, or more colloquially, “write drunk; revise sober”.
• Working around the bugs in your brain. And there are many, from the primitive “lizard brain” that likes to override our higher cognitive functions to cognitive biases to generational affinity.
• Learning deliberately: what learning is and isn’t, how to plan to learn, figuring out what your learning style is and how to best take advantage of it, and harnessing mind maps, documentation and teaching in order to learn.
• Gaining experience, which includes understanding the importance of fun and how pressure kills cognition, learning the “inner game” and why your mantra shouldn’t be “learn to build”, but “build to learn”.
• Managing focus, a very important topic since there are so many things vying for it, from office interruptions to the siren song of the internet, with email, IM, Twitter, Digg, Reddit and LOLcats. One of my favourite bits in this section was some research whose results indicated that constantly checking your email lowers your effective IQ more than smoking a joint.

Get the book, then meet the author! Register for Andy’s Ignite Your Coding session!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Whenever Microsoft needs to make a radical change in the way they do things, they bring in a hip Asian guy. That’s why they’ve got me shaking things up on Microsoft Canada’s Tech Evangelism Team, and it’s also why Albert Shum is redefining the way Microsoft does mobile phones in his role as the Director of Microsoft’s Mobile Experience Design Team. True to my earlier statement that Canadian techies have been punching well above their weight class since Alexander Graham Bell, Albert studied engineering and architecture at the University of Waterloo.

Here’s a video featuring Albert talking about the design philosophies behind the completely reworked from-the-ground-up Windows Phone 7. It’s featured in the Microsoft News Centre article Windows Phone Designer Seeks the Right Balance.

I like what he says at the end of the video:

What will our users see first? I think hopefully they’ll see themselves in the phone. I think that’s a really key part of how we designed it. It’s really focused on making this phone your phone. We took the idea of making it personal, so that when you look at the start experience, it’s about your content. It’s about your people, it’s your pictures, it’s your music, it’s presented way up there.

My phone is going to be different than your phone, and I think that’s a really key part: that personalized way of navigating the thing that you care about, the things that you want to share, the things you want to listen to, and those are the key moments where we first present that it’s your phone.

If you’re thinking up ideas for applications to write for Windows Phone, keep what Albert says in mind: it’s not about feature lists; it’s all about the user and the user experience.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Every Thursday in March and April, my co-worker John Bristowe and I will host the Ignite Your Coding webcast series. Each hour-long webcast will feature a guest speaker selected from the bright lights in software development. John and I will start off by asking them about their views on the industry and how to thrive in an era of great technological, business and social change, and then it’ll be your turn to ask the questions.

The theme of the webcast series is “staying on top of change”. I can’t deny hat there’s a certain thrill to the changes in this still-very-new industry (remember, the formal definition of “computable” isn’t even a hundred years old, and some of the pioneers, like C.A.R. Hoare, are still alive). They can also be overwhelming. All the guests on the show have ideas about how to cope with the ongoing changes, how to make the most of your career and life as a developer and intriguing stories about their life “in the trenches”.

John and I started getting interviewees for the show by drafting a list of “dream guests” and then inviting them to speak. John’s pretty well-established in the .NET world, so he went after people that Microsoft developers would know well. I’ve spent more time in the world outside Microsoft development, so I was assigned to invite people often seen in those spheres. We ended up with a great and varied set of guests, some you might have expected and some who might surprise you. We think that you’ll enjoy the webcast and find it both entertaining and informative, whether you eat, breathe and sleep Visual Studio, dream in TextMate or stand on the front lines in the Emacs/vi holy war.

All you have to do to catch the live Ignite Your Coding webcasts is register for the ones you want (see below). We’ll record them all, so if you can’t catch the live shows, you can at least listen to them later.

Here are the guests and the dates:

Pragmatic Programming, Thinking and Learning (Andy Hunt)

Andy Hunt has been behind some of the biggest ideas in everyday software development in the past decade. From co-authoring the Agile Manifesto and The Pragmatic Programmer to starting The Pragmatic Bookshelf, one of the most influential developer book publishers, to helping bring about the rise of MVC web frameworks, chances are that he’s had some influence on your day-to-day work. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll talk with Andy about the ideas in his latest book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. We’ll discuss why your brain is where software development really happens, how you can refactor your thinking and as he puts it, “just the plain old weirdness that is people”.

Thursday, March 4, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Composable Applications FTW (Glenn Block)

Glenn Block is an industry expert who has broad enterprise software development experience including architecture and system design. Typically, developers of client applications face a number of challenges. One of the more common challenges is to build applications in a way that allows its various parts & pieces to be interchanged quickly and seamlessly. In this conversation, Glenn Block will provide guidance on how to structure your applications in such a way that will facilitate this capability.

Thursday, March 11, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Essence versus Ceremony (Jeremy Miller)

Jeremy Miller is no stranger to the developer community of .NET. He is the author of StructureMap and the forthcoming StoryTeller, as well as being a major contributor to FubuMVC and Fluent NHibernate. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll discuss a wide range of topics; including how newer OSS efforts in the developer community of .NET are trying to reduce friction, AAA-style mocking instead of record/replay mocking, the effective use extension methods for cleaner/readable/easier unit testing, jQuery magic, and much more!

Thursday, March 18, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Agile Techniques for Paying Back Technical Debt (David Laribee)

David Laribee is currently an Agile Coach at VersionOne. Technical debt refers to the costs associated with byzantine dependencies and sloppy code. Technical debt is a drag. It can kill productivity, making maintenance annoying, difficult, or, in some cases, impossible. In this one-hour webcast, David will provide us with some advice for “paying back technical debt” with agile techniques.

Thursday, March 25, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Scalability and Performance for All (Richard Campbell)

Richard Campbell knows a thing or two about scalability and performance, having designed and built applications for over 30 years with a number of leading North American organizations. He’s also taken that knowledge and applied it at his company Strangeloop, which builds an appliance that specializes in website acceleration. In this webcast, Richard will help us navigate the world of scalability and performance and how developers need to think differently when building applications for the future.

Thursday, April 8, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST, (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

State of the .NET Developer Nation (Scott Hanselman)

Scott Hanselman is a household name to nearly every developer of .NET worldwide. From his deeply-informative blog to his engaging podcast, Scott is well known for his expertise and insights that he shares willingly with the broader community of .NET. In this webcast, we’ll talk to Scott about the state of the developer nation of .NET; a “what’s hot and what’s not” with developers of .NET today. We’ll also chat with Scott about his role at Microsoft and tips on staying on top of your game as a developer in the industry today.

Thursday, April 15, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Horrors, Overflows and Fake Plastic Rock (Jeff Atwood)

Jeff Atwood writes the popular developer blog Coding Horror, created and helps run the Stack Overflow and Server Fault and SuperUser community Q&A sites and co-hosts the Stack Overflow podcast with Joel “Joel on Software” Spolsky. With a schedule like this and a one-year-old, he somehow stills finds the time to keep his Rock Band skills finely honed. Join us as we chat with Jeff in a one-hour webcast where we talk about the Stack Overflow phenomenon, how Coding Horror grew to become one of the most-read developer blogs and career strategies in the post-desktop age.

Thursday, April 22, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

A Chat with “Uncle Bob” Martin (Robert C. Martin)

His business card may say “Robert C. Martin”, founder and CEO of the Object Mentor consulting firm, but we know and love him as “Uncle Bob”. He’s been coding since the Beatles broke up, and in that four-decade span, he literally wrote the books on agile and extreme programming as well as the letters UML, OOP and C++. Throughout the industry, he’s known as a champion of proper design, test-driven development and just plain writing good code. We’ll chat with Uncle Bob in this one-hour webcast, where we’ll talk about software craftsmanship, why it takes work and why it matters.

Thursday, April 29, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

To find out more about the Ignite Your Coding webcast series, visit the Ignite Your Coding page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I met Peter “Mudge” Zatko at the Cult of the Dead Cow’s hotel bungalow at DefCon 8, the 2000 edition of the notorious hacker conference. My coworker at OpenCola, Oxblood Ruffin, was a member of the the “cDc” and introduced me and the other OpenColans to him and the other nicknames in the group: “Sir Dystic”, “Dildog”, “Deth Veggie”, “Night Stalker”, “Grandmaster Ratte” and many other black-clad, charmingly oddball characters far more interesting than the characters in the movie Hackers. I think I learned more about security in the hour-long group conversation with him than I’ve learned from countless corporate security training videos and training courses. Later at the conference, the cDc would hand out more copies of Back Orifice 2000, a tool that would cause much heartburn to many people at the company where I now work.

He’s now got a big gig: Program Manager at the Strategic Technologies Office at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the R&D office for the Department of Defense. His area of focus? Security, naturally.

Mudge was responsible for the early research into buffer overflow attacks and published one of the first papers on the topic. In 1998, he and others from L0pht Heavy Industries (a.k.a. “The L0pht”, a hacker think tank) testified before a Senate committee, saying that they could take the internet down in 30 minutes. L0pht was acquired by the security company @stake in 1999, and in 2000, the company where I worked, OpenCola, hired them to do some security consulting. He’s met with President Clinton to talk about DOS attacks and worked at BBN as a division scientist.

I’m curious to see what Mudge can do with government gear and a big budget. In the cnet article, he talks about actively responding to threats. "I don’t want people to be putting out virus signatures after a virus has come out," he says. "I want an active defense. I want to be at the sharp pointy end of the stick."

Do not mess with his pointy end! Congrats, Mudge!

It’s another “local guy makes good” story: Mesh Conference co-founder, Globe and Mail writer and editor for the better part of two decades, all-round respected Canadian voice in tech journalism and fixture of the Toronto tech scene, Mathew Ingram is leaving the Globe to join GigaOM as one of its full-time reporters.

This is great news all ‘round: for GigaOM, who are getting a great writer to join their ranks, for Mathew, because this is a great opportunity, and for Canada – whose techies since Alexander Graham Bell have been punching above their weight class – who now has a voice in one of technology’s most important and influential blogs.

Congratulations, Mathew, and see you online!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

My friend Sacha Chua is not someone who you’d think of as an introvert, but she is. Hang out in Toronto’s tech scene and sooner or later, you’ll catch one of her presentations, which she does with all with the energetic bounce that is her stock in trade. She considers technology evangelism and outreach not just part of her job, but part of her life. She has hundreds of blog subscribers, Facebook followers and LinkedIn contacts, and her Twitter followers number in the thousands. Despite all her public appearances, blog entries, and vast social network, she’s still an introvert.

There’s a reason the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” has endured: it’s true (so true, in fact, that Malcolm Gladwell has done quite well for himself telling stories based on this particular nugget of wisdom). Wonderful things arise from opportunities, opportunities often come from connections and the some of the best connections are “weak ties”: those casual acquaintances who exist slightly outside our regular circles and who thus have information that we might otherwise never acquire. For a madly-grinning accordion-playing extrovert like Yours Truly, gathering weak ties is quite easy, and I’ve parleyed many a weak tie into an opportunity.

But what if you’re not an extrovert? Can introverts make the connections that can make the difference between getting by and getting ahead? The answer is yes, by playing to introversion’s strengths, taking advantage of some tools and following the steps in Sacha’s presentation, The Shy Connector, which I’ve included below:

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

It’s Back!

Developer Night in Canada is back! It’s a podcast featuring interviews with Canadians who make software, from all parts of the industry (yup, not just the Microsoft world), working all over the world, talking all about what they do and the projects they’re working on. It’s hosted by Yours Truly and my co-worker and fellow Developer Evangelist at Microsoft Canada, John Bristowe.

Developer Night in Canada is a bare-bones podcast. It’s just me and John talking with whomever we’re interviewing, just having an unscripted conversation with as little editing as possible.

Interview with Joel Semeniuk

In this episode, John and I talk with Joel Semeniuk, founder and Chief Envisioning Officer of Imaginet Resources, a Microsoft Gold Partner based in Canada. We talk about all sorts of things, including his work in healthcare technology, kanban, Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, SharePoint, Telerik and travelling.

Joel is a Microsoft Regional Director. RDs (as they;re often called) aren’t Microsoft employees, but independent developers, architects, trainers, and other professionals who provide a vital link between Microsoft and the developer community. You see RDs doing things like helping companies and individuals get the most out of Microsoft developer tools, writing books, articles and websites on developing on Microsoft’s platforms and making presentations, teaching courses and meeting up with developers face-to face. Without the help of RDs like Joel, my job is considerably more difficult – I’m glad that people like him are out there.

Some quick facts about Joel:

• Has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Manitoba
• Spent the last twelve years providing educational, development, and infrastructure consulting services to customers throughout North America
• Specializes in helping organizations improve their software development and information technology practices
• Has probably forgotten more about Team Foundation Server (and its predecessor Team System) than I will ever learn

Here’s the MP3 – it’s just under 25MB and runs 53 minutes, 58 seconds (you can left click to listen now, or right click to “Save as”).

Here’s Linux creator Linus Torvalds, taking a break from the Japan Linux Symposium to pose at a store where Windows 7 was on sale:

[Thanks to Stefan Arentz for pointing me to the picture!]

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I bought a fuzzy “Cat in the Hat”-style raver hat with a Canadian flag pattern on a whim earlier this year, thinking that I’d probably find a pretty good use for it some day. That day, it turns out, was yesterday, where I turned it into what I believe was yesterday’s only Steve Ballmer photo-op with a non-management Microsoft Canada employee:

Photo by Barnaby Jeans.

Yesterday was a busy day at the Harbour Castle Convention Centre, where we had an all-day Steve Ballmer-rama. In the morning, Steve keynoted an event showcasing Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 for the media, key customers and partners. This was followed by an employees-only “town hall” where Steve did a short presentation followed by a Q&A session. On a whim similar to the one that led me to buy it, I took the hat (along with the accordion) along with me.

Following a suggestion from my co-worker Damir, I arrived very early for the town hall, grabbed a seat by the stage and donned the hat. When Steve made his appearance, he did so in classic Ballmer style, running and whooping, high-fiving people as he made his way to the stage. As soon as he saw me, he yelled “Hey!”, put the hat on and posed with me for the photo above.

I’d made a decent splash at Microsoft in my first year, and I’d been wondering if I could match it in my second, which began on Monday. This isn’t a bad start.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.