In my MVP Summit recap, I mentioned that I want to help contribute to the docs on docs.microsoft.com, including Visual Basic. Many people know that I’ve focused on C# the most in the .NET stack, followed by PowerShell. VB.NET didn’t get as much focus career-wise for me, as I had a rocky start with it and really fell for C#. However, I will forever have a soft spot for Visual Basic. But why? This is my story.
Last week, I was out at the Microsoft MVP Summit in Redmond, Washington. As many people know, I’ve been a Microsoft fan all of my life, so going out to the main campus is like a pilgrimage to me. I made sure to wear some of my MVP gear on the flight out, as it’s a good way to find other MVPs. While there were none flying from my starting spot, I met up with a bunch of MVPs – Azure, Outlook, Visual Studio – in Detroit.
Over the past few days, I saw a lot of people talking with the #PayToSpeak hashtag, and knowing that some of my followers were curious, I figured I better weigh in.
Community-Run Events
When I know an event is community-run, then I know to expect some degree of #PayToSpeak. Face it – when a community group is just starting out, sponsorship is a tough thing to get. I want to see a community be stronger from our community-run events, so if there isn’t a budget for speakers’ travel and entertainment, {shrug} that’s fine with me. I’ve been organizing community-run events since 2008, so I am sympathetic with those running the events. I really enjoy seeing communities help each other grow.
Now, if it’s a community event that’s well-established, then that may be a different story. I may ask for some assistance with travel costs – a hotel room or a place to crash is appreciated. But for me, I see value in speaking to particular audiences, knowing that it will lead to work. So I take that into consideration and typically shoulder some of my costs since I know they’ll be recuperated later.
Events and the Distance Factor
If there’s one thing people should know about me, it’s that I’m a family person. I like being able to talk with my family when I’m on the road and try not to travel far from home. So you don’t see me leave far from the Cleveland area – usually sticking to Columbus, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Sometimes, I can make exceptions for Cincinnati, Dayton, and Kalamazoo. If it’s a relatively short drive (one I can do in a day sanely) and if I don’t have to stay more than a couple nights, I’m happy. So I keep fairly local so that if I have to #PayToSpeak even a little bit, the costs are kept down.
If I am far from home but have friends or familiar faces where I am, that also helps. When I am traveling and knowing something familiar is at the other end, then I feel less anxious.
What About Flying? That’s Expensive to #PayToSpeak!
As long as I don’t have to fly through La Guardia, then I am okay with flying. Anything with direct flights out of Cleveland or Akron is even better, as I have yet to fly somewhere with a direct flight. I do fly for engagements at times, but I keep that to a minimum as that gets costly, and that’s a cost I’d rather see the engagement pick up than have to pick it up myself. (I will work with the engagement to keep that cost low.)
This year, there were a couple events that went outside of close distance, and within good reasons. I’ve known many of the Music City Code folks since pre-parenthood, and many are considered part of my tech family on the road. Since my husband has been pushing me to get back into conference speaking again, I figured I’d go to a familiar area. As for KCDC, that was one I had heard my friends mention, and seeing Jeff Strauss involved with it and knowing that my friends Mike and Jay think well of him, I figured I should see what that was like. (Also, I’ve learned that the KCDC crew are just as awesome and are also friends with my friends. So the tech family grows!)
Why Not Ask ALL Conferences for Travel Assistance? Why #PayToSpeak at all?
I’m also an event organizer and not just a speaker. So when I sign up to speak at an event, I am also considering what the event organizers have to deal with in comping speakers’ expenses. As Jim points out, the costs do add up crazily if we – as organizers of small to medium-sized conferences – comp ALL of the speakers’ expenses:
I've got a bit of experience around that. The costs get crazy very easily. Quickly adds at least $50/per ticket for a medium-sized conference with 50 speakers and 1500 attendees–just for airfare.
Confs need to comp SOMETHING, though. At least hotel costs.
— Jim Holmes (@aJimHolmes) December 1, 2017
What About Larger, For-Profit Events?
Depending on where those are held, how they align with my schedule, and what is covered, I’m a lot more selective with larger, for-profit events. These, I typically will not #PayToSpeak.
Why #PayToSpeak?
There are times when I have little hesitation on considering #PayToSpeak some:
I think David Tanzer captured my overall thoughts well:
Thing is: If you outright refuse to #paytospeak you might miss out on some great conferences. If this is a net win or a net loss for you, depends only on what *you* expect to gain from a conference.
— David Tanzer (@dtanzer) November 30, 2017
And…
Here's the deal. If you're running a cheap community building centred event I'll quite likely work with you to keep costs low. Even If have to #PayToSpeak
— Tobbe Gyllebring (@drunkcod) December 1, 2017
So I am okay with #PayToSpeak for the right cases.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated in any way with Svaha Apparel. It all started with a Facebook ad, and then I noticed them – geeky dresses WITH POCKETS. So what’s a geekette to do when she finds fun dresses WITH POCKETS and fun geeky pieces? She blogs about it!
Last weekend, I was busy playing superhero, having fun with some of the behind-the-scenes logistics and social media for Cleveland Space Apps. Since I had a little more visibility, I figured I’d be fine wearing my geeky outfits – after all, if a geekette can’t be wearing her geeky outfits at a NASA, we have other problems.
Photo courtesy of NASA Glenn Library
Thank you for flying Air Circuitry!
But it isn’t just about dresses! I love that Svaha Apparel has so many geeky options. On Sunday, I was rocking a Pi Spiral Polka Dots Top:
I love how comfortable the material is and how colorful the designs are. Being a typical geek, a lot of my wardrobe involves black, dark grey, and dark blue shirts. However, there are moments where I love to add a bit more color and energy to my wardrobe.
And Svaha Apparel isn’t just for adults! They have A LOT of designs for children, including geeky dresses for the children! I imagine if I had a little girl that I’d be buying more of those dresses. However, I am a mom to boys – so instead of dresses, I’m buying a lot of geeky T-shirts. (It also helps that my husband is as much of a geek as I am.)
My husband brought the boys to visit me at NASA on Sunday, and they too were in Svaha Apparel. My younger one was wearing the Retro Solar System Glow-in-the-Dark Kids T-Shirt, and my older one was wearing the Future Astronaut Kids T-Shirt:
If you’re looking for geeky gear that’s comfortable to wear, I highly recommend checking out Svaha Apparel!
And if you’re Svaha Apparel and you’re reading this, I’d LOVE to see a lot of those kids shirts in adult sizes – so many fun designs, why do the kids get to have all the fun? 🙂
With work/life balance being a questionable topic for some, I figured I would share what it’s like here. If you haven’t seen me in the community in awhile, there’s a lot going on at work and also need to spend time with my family every now and then as well.
Between now and the beginning of May, if I seem a little chaotic, it’s because I’m walking on a tightrope as carefully as can be. The work/life/community tightrope is crazy right now!
Work
Life
Work – Cleveland Tech Consulting
Community
I keep “doing” and then look back later wondering “how?!?” Such is the life of Sadukie!
These past few months have been crazy-busy in the community:
In addition to the community activity, I’ve moved contracting work as a side project, working full-time with The Software Guild as a Lead Instructor – currently teaching Java! While I love working in Akron, I wasn’t liking the commute. So my family is in the process of moving closer to Akron as well. Lots of chaos here!
So what happened….?
NASA Space Apps Challenge – April 22-24, 2016
This was an amazing event – we hit our goal of 150 attendees this year! NASA creates the International Space Apps Challenge, and communities throughout the world get together to help solve the various proposed challenges. Our local group in Cleveland has hosted the event at NASA Glenn Research Center, and this year was spectacular. In addition to roping in various tech communities, we had MakerGear bring in some 3D printers, which were super helpful and busy all weekend. We also had all walks of life – from as young as pre-high school! As an organizer, I am pleased with how everything went locally, and I can’t wait to see what next year brings!
Stir Trek – May 6, 2016
What can be said about an event that has 6 hours of technical content, followed by our own private viewing of a movie that opens that day? This year, the movie was Captain America: Civil War. It was great to see the lineup – as always, speaker and session selection is rough because we get so many submissions and have to whittle it down to only so many time slots. Also amazing to see was the adventures of the Stwrap – these things that you can put on your purse, backpack, badge, etc. It’s almost as bad as Pokemon Go – the Stwraps were also in demand with a “gotta get them all” attitude. While I wasn’t on the path to get them all, I did bring home some, and I have my favorite Stir Trek Stwraps on my backpack at work. While I didn’t stay for the movie, I did enjoy listening to all the feedback and look forward to helping make next year’s event better. (And yes, for those wondering, we really have outgrown that location and their capabilities, and we are hoping to find a more suitable host for next year’s event!)
BYTE – Bring Your Tech Expertise
I had received an email from a local high school student that was looking for sponsors for their hackathon. My first thought was – “I need to sponsor this! These are young, impressionable students who need to know about the tech community!” and so I sponsored them as Cleveland Tech Events. It was great to see local high schools – Hathaway Brown, Orange, Mentor, University School, and another whose name is escaping me at the moment – compete against each other.
Their ice breaker round included being assigned groups with other people from other schools and creating a story with 3 random words. The winning story was about a Holy HashMap! (Yes – the nerdery was strong with this group! 🙂 )
After the ice breaker, the students then regrouped into their teams and tackled programming problems from Kattis. This was my first time seeing Kattis, and I think it’s a great system for hackathons and competing. They have problems to solve, scoring, and even a leaderboard!
In the afternoon, the students competed in computer science and general computer-related trivia through Kahoot. Competition was fierce! Even the team moderators were getting into it and trying to figure out the answers to some of the questions.
So… what’s next?
What’s next on my radar? Maybe settling down!
Seriously, though…
Stay tuned – more information coming soon!
A long time ago, when I was much younger, I used to see Microsoft as this gigantic, unapproachable power that was popular in homes. I saw Linux as this operating system that truly hardcore geeks played with, geeks who were anti-social and more like hackers. This was my misperception as a youngster.
As I got older, my friend Nivex introduced me to Linux – a friendlier, gentler idea than I had perceived. Sure, I may have had to compile my kernel and install the distro quickly on my own since I kernel panicked in a record amount of time. But Slackware Linux… it was still totally hardcore in my mind, hardcore and made me wonder “why was I trying to learn to work with an operating system that I felt was out-of-my-league?”
I also saw the flame wars and vitriol in the Linux community whenever Microsoft was mentioned. Seeing the immaturity of that community steered me away from that. For a community that embraced open source, they were closed minded, not open-minded. It wasn’t something for me to dabble in, community-wise.
However, as time has gone on, I have continued to use both operating systems while staying on the mindset that one day they may come close.
Running .NET on Linux
Fast-forward to 2008/2009… I had caught wind of the Mono project. Mono is an open source implementation of .NET that would bring .NET technologies to Linux, or so they claimed. I didn’t believe it – Microsoft technologies on Linux without being in a Windows emulator… this idea just wasn’t computing. I had to try it out for myself.
Being the polyglot that I am, I also heard about running non-Microsoft languages on top of .NET – specifically IronRuby and IronPython. Again, mixing Microsoft with communities that aren’t typically friendly of Microsoft… I was skeptical of the idea and had to see it myself.
So what did I do? Since Ruby has a stronger community than Python in Cleveland, I decided to take the road less traveled and venture down exploring IronPython. But wait… Mono does .NET on Linux, and python runs on Linux…. could IronPython run on Linux?
PyCon 2009 – Showing IronPython on Linux
In my adventures of clearing up my skepticism, I had fun playing with IronPython and learning how to work with it on Linux. Somehow, I decided it was a good idea to submit a talk to the national Python conference – PyCon – on running this. What I hadn’t known was that the IronPython team and the father of the language (Jim Hugunin) would be in my audience. To this day, I remember this presentation experience clearly – from Jim taking over the Q&A session (politely!) and then waiting for me after my talk to tell me that it was cool to see since Microsoft didn’t let him play with Linux at work. These are my slides from that conference:
One of my college friends – the ever-so-awesome code warrior Lou Maresca – mentioned that he is a cohost (with Robert Ballecer, SJ- the Digital Jesuit also known as Padre) on a netshow called Coding 101 over on TWiT. Now I have to admit it … up until this point, I really hadn’t heard much about TWiT, let alone shows. Anyhow, Lou asked if I would appear on one of their wildcard episodes, and I figured why not!
So I did some research before the show to see what I was getting myself into.
What is Coding 101 all about?
From what I can tell….
Basically… this is my cup of tea!
So… what is TWiT and Coding 101 about?
Well, first of all, we did a live recording on September 21. I hadn’t realized just what all that entailed on the TWiT side of things. They have a studio that’s live recording all the time, complete with an IRC chat channel of a lively bunch of people.
The best description of what they do is on their site: What is TWiT.tv?
I’m not going to lie – the first time I logged into the live site, waiting to go live, I had a fan girl moment while talking with Lou. I had done research on Coding 101 but not enough on TWiT to know that it’s Leo Laporte’s baby. I had no idea that our live session was following his segment. I nearly lost it – the “OMG! That’s Leo Laporte! That’s the guy from Screensavers on TechTV when I was much younger! Wait… we’re following him?!?” moment. *facepalm*
So anyhow… we were recording live on September 21. I was nervous, as this was the largest Internet recording – podcast or netshow – that I had done, and I hadn’t worked with such a big crew before. At one point, one of the TWiT crew had said something to me about moving my microphone, and that was the oddest experience ever – having someone else’s voice in my head besides the voices of the show really messed with me. Did I really hear that? Was there a guy’s voice talking to me to ask me to adjust my mic?!?
Overall, how was the recording live experience?
Introverted me was terrified going into this, but Padre and Lou are awesome hosts who keep things moving along conversationally, which put me at ease a ton! The chat channel was great too – very much an interactive bunch.
From the feedback I’m seeing so far, I look forward to returning and probably speaking on PowerShell!
So… where is your wildcard episode? How can we see it?
Check it out: Coding 10184 – Wildcard with Sarah Dutkiewicz
I recently was asked by Shawn Rakowski if I would be interested in appearing on his podcast – My Life for the Code. On his podcast, he talks to people of all different backgrounds and roles in tech to find out what got them into code, what they’re doing now, and asked some questions about resources and recommendations.
I had a lot of fun chatting with him about my adventures from back in the day to where I am today. Check out my appearance on My Life for the Code in Episode 10, In the Community with Sarah “sadukie” Dutkiewicz.
With CodeMash coming to an end, I figured I better recap my experiences while they’re still fresh on my mind. I’ve recapped my Precompiler experiences in the previous post. Now, let’s see how I did on the days with sessions.
Thursday
I had Thursday figured out early on. I figured I’d wake up early, catch breakfast and an awesome keynote, and then catch some sessions to inspire me for future projects. Unfortunately, none of that happened, as I managed to wake up in the middle of the night to turn my alarm off and go back to sleep. Doh! By the time I arrived at the conference center, I had time to talk with friends, vendors, and other attendees and then make my way to lunch. It was a great chance that I got to meet my Microsoft MVP Lead, Esther Lee. She came to CodeMash to meet up with some of her MVPs, as well as other developer MVPs from other countries. It was great to talk with her and give feedback on products, knowing that our feedback is heard and taken into consideration.
GesturePak
I managed to make it to one session on Thursday – Carl Franklin’s session on GesturePak, used for creating gestures for Kinect for Windows. I wanted to sit in on this mostly for my own curiosity. Now that I have a child in my life who seems obsessed with our XBOX Kinect – only 9.5 months old and already yelling at the XBOX to turn on and try to get it to do things, I want to look into writing programs for him that he can interact with. When I was younger, I used to write flashcard apps in VB6 for my baby brother, who’s 8 years younger than me, so it’s natural for me to want to write apps for my own little guy. Seeing how easy it was to create gestures with GesturePak, I can only hope to one day find the time to write some apps for Kinect for Windows for Logan to play with.
Friday
I knew I wouldn’t catch much in the way of sessions on Friday. My goal on Friday was to check out the Arduino session and then relax, as my family was coming. My dream for Friday came true.
Arduino
I really wanted to check out Sharon Cichelli’s Arduino talk on Friday. We have an Arduino here at home that has a bunch of temperature sensors connected to it, so that we can monitor our house temperatures. We originally had kept our chinchillas in a room on our 1st floor and had to make sure their room stayed within a certain temperature range. However, once I was pregnant, we moved the chinchillas to our basement (where the temperature would be acceptable) and turned their old room into the nursery, where we could monitor the room temperature for our little boy. We take the data from our temperature sensors and graph it with Cacti. Here’s a sample of the output from our Arduino:
Sharon’s talk was great! It was great to get other ideas on how Arduinos can be used – robots, video games, ambient clock, greenhouse monitoring, and many more things. Honestly, the ideas for using Arduinos are endless. She also has a great list of resources for getting started with Arduinos. Seeing how easy it is to work with, I am tempted to play around with Arduinos more at home. Either that or – after seeing many presentations on it – I may consider playing with a Netduino and using the .NET Micro framework.
Conclusion
While I didn’t catch much in the way of sessions this year – as the session list just didn’t really jump out at me and excite me as much as it has in the past, I still enjoyed the sessions I did catch. More importantly, I was happy to talk with people who I see sometimes just once a year at CodeMash and seeing friends in general. The hallway discussions and chatting with friends at lunch really got me thinking about the rest of this year. CodeMash was my first big conference since having my son, and it’s great to be back in the community again.