I am pumped to be talking at Developer Day this Saturday in Durham, I have given talks to lots of different crowds but this will be the first time I am talking about a .NET related topic to a group of developers that aren’t .NET specific. I am what you might call a reluctant Microsoft developer at this point, my main product is still mostly written in .NET so I use it everyday and have made the best of it. In this talk I am going to talk about the Open Source ecosystem in .NET and more specifically the open source tools and projects I have used while building Adzerk.

For the talk I have two main goals: Show .NET developers that better options are out there and to show non-.NET developers that .NET isn’t just about dragging and dropping it like it’s hot.

If you are anywhere close to Durham I would highly encourage you to come on out, there are some great talks about Play (an interesting Java framework), Dojo, Erlang, NoSQL and much more.

Check it out.

(Oh and I will have free 30-day subscriptions to TekPub with me if you want one just track me down)

-James

It was a very very interesting year. In January my long-term contract ended and I have managed to avoid taking another long-term contract. I did take 3 small contracts throughout the year, two around working with Azure and one in Rails. I hope to take even less work this year (although I might be doing a short gig in January, but it sounds pretty fun).

This year a number of big things happened. The first was that I got serious about The Lounge and Ruby Row and spun them off into a separate company called Zerk Media. In January the idea was that I would continue to build new networks, but that didn’t work out so well. (I blogged about that already).

The second big thing was the launch of TekPub. I am thrilled to be a part of this with Rob and it is going excellent so far. It’s great to see an idea be validated and all the hard work pay off quickly rather than months or years down the road.

Some other very exciting things have happened this year, but I am going to talk about those in separate blog posts over the next couple weeks. (both are new ventures)

For 2010 I have some big goals:

1) Continue to grow TekPub, if we can just maintain the momentum of bringing out new series and reaching new customers it will be a great year.

2) Solidify Ruby Row as the best way to reach Ruby developers, the network grew hugely this year but there is still alot of room to grow.

3) Turn The Lounge into the premier independent network to reach Microsoft focused developers, the advertising market took quite a hit in early 2009 but it has recovered nicely and with a new sales team working with me its only going to take off in 2010.

4) I am launching a new venture this month and it is going to be the big one, it’s the culmination of 2 years of being in the advertising business and I think it will take up a large amount of my time in the new year.

6) Lose Weight. This is always a goal isn’t it? But this year I realized that not exercising and eating bad has contributed to more stress and unhappiness, its going to change this year and I hope to be back below 200 by summer.

Oh, I also managed to read 24 books (fiction and business) this year which isn’t too bad, I should be able to top it this year.

-James

No, I’m not moving there permanently (I love living in Raleigh).

Earlier this year I realized that two conferences I wanted to go to were going to be in San Francisco this year. The Business of Software conference is running from the 9th-11th of November and RubyConf is running from the 19th-21st. So I had the crazy idea of taking my wife and our daughter out to San Francisco and living there for most of November. Then we realized if we went earlier we could have my mother in law come for the first week so we would have time to go enjoy some of the nice restaurants and areas of San Francisco since she could watch our daughter. So this saturday (17th of October) we are heading out to San Francisco and staying until the 22nd of November (thankfully my sister can house sit and watch the cats).

As a bootstrapping startup spending the money to do this might not seem like the smartest idea, but this is also one of those things I could never do if I was working for someone else or even if I was working a long-term contract like I have in the past.

In addition to attending these two conferences I am also going to be going to Startup School on the 24th in Berkeley. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw this announced and I realized I would be in town and got accepted to go. While in town I will also get to meet with both of my board members and a partner in another venture. I hope to make the most of the trip and attend as many events and meet with as many interesting people and companies as possible.

If you live in the area and would like to meet, or if you know of any interesting events (.NET/Mono, Ruby, Erlang, Startup) definitely let me know!

-James

It’s New Years Eve and what better way to spend the night then writing up a post about the last year. The biggest change this year was the birth of my wonderful daughter Katherine, who we affectionately call Rin. It truly has been life changing and while it would be nice if she slept a little bit more than she does she is an extremely cute and happy baby who is growing and learning so quickly.

I feel good about what I was able to accomplish this year. I covered some of the progress on The Lounge in an earlier post, but basically I took over The Lounge in late december and managed to quadruple the number of publishers, venture into podcast, screencast, and RSS advertising and increase the revenue by over 5x. I launched the Ruby Room which because Ruby Row and it is doing great so far. I wish I had launched more networks this year and that will be a major focus of mine next year.

I also had the pleasure of working with Microsoft and the SDS team to write the ruby library for Microsoft SDS, it was great to not only be playing with a cool new technology like SDS but to be using Ruby with it made it even better.

Earlier this year I posted some goals so here is a quick rundown of how I did.

Goal #1: Lose Weight and get into shape.

My plan to lose weight didn’t work out very well but I have high hopes for the year ahead. I never expected how much time a baby would consume and it has made it tough to get back into my running schedule. Things are starting to stabilize though and I think I will be able to get back into it and hope to run at least a 10k by the end of the year.

Goal #2: Minimize and Simplify

This isn’t a great goal since it’s hard to measure, but I do feel like I have minimized and trashed alot of clutter and that I have embraced simplicity in everything I attempt. (it is a constant struggle to keep things simple, but it is a very noble goal)

Goal #3: Stop Consulting

I didn’t manage to do this in 2008, but my long-term contract is ending Jan 15th and I will be attempting to avoid taking another long-term contract. I am open to smaller contracts, but I don’t want another 6-12 month contract and if possible I would like to avoid it completely. (more on this later)

Goal #4: Make 22books a success

Well, this definitely didn’t happen. I decided I needed to focus on The Lounge and Ruby Row over doing any work on 22books. I haven’t made any updates in months, but the site continues to work and has a small group of users. On the plus side the site has been running on a couple of mongrels without being restarted for 6+ months.

Goal #5: Grow The Lounge

I posted about this earlier this week, The Lounge has continued to grow and has started to surpass my expectations. I have huge plans for The Lounge in 2009.

Goal #6: Re-Launch Windows Developer Power Tools

I missed this one as well, my decision to focus on The Lounge and Ruby Row meant other ventures like this suffered.

Goal #7: Reset this blog

I didn’t write a post a week, I am not even sure I wrote a post a month. I can’t believe that I used to post daily back in 04, but I lived a totally different life back then… I wish I had that time now.

So while I didn’t hit alot of my goals I learned some very important lessons about focus. By neglecting 22books and WDPT as well as the blog I was able to get much more done on The Lounge and Ruby Row than I would of otherwise . I am going to keep this in mind when making goals for next year.

-James