Solon Spartans Win 2008 2A Football Championship

On Saturday afternoon the Solon Spartans became back to back 2A football champions. They won with a dominating 60-14 score. Congrats again.

Later Saturday night the Hawkeyes beat the Gophers 55-0, even better it was on the Gophers home turf in the Metrodome.

Saturday was a good day for football teams from Johnson County.

Iowa Tech is Heating Up

Early this year I blogged about the general state the .NET community in Eastern Iowa and Iowa in general. Some of the goals on January 1st were to see more techies blogging, more speaking, to run our first camp and to see the tech community grow in general.

So here is an update. We had an incredibly successful first code camp at the University of Iowa conference center on May 3rd. We had around 130 people attend over the course of the day with about 25 people presenting.

On the blogging front, Tim Barcz has really taken his blogging up a notch and has moved over to the devlicio.us community. Chris Missal has been doing some nice work with ASP.NET and jQuery and I hope to see some more good blogging from there.

Bryan Sampica, Javier Lozano and D’Arcy Lussier(well he’s Canadian, but that’s close enough) are writing “ASP.NET 3.5 Programmers Reference“. This is very cool to have two Iowa authors writing a major programming title.

I’m sure there are other good bloggers in Iowa who are doing good writing, let me know in comments who else is out there.

Our next code camp in Iowa is just a couple of weeks away on November 8th. It is being held at the DMACC West campus in West Des Moines. We have great speakers from Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, Texas and Ohio. We are also introducing a new format called a fishbowl in two of the sessions. Register here if you haven’t already.

The Cedar Falls / Waterloo area is getting a new Ineta group (tentatively Cedar Valley INETA) headed up by Josh Flory. We hope to see good things happen up north.

CRineta webcasted it’s first user group meeting presentation in October which was interesting. We have some work to improve this medium, but it has a lot of potential for reaching people that can make it into the meetings. Josh Flory is the primary person who made this happen, so thanks to him.

The University of Iowa has a new Ruby group as well, which is a great development.

We have 2 1/2 months left in 2008 so let’s finish this year off well.

By the way, Tim Barcz, Derik Whittaker and I might have some big news in a week or two but I can’t officially announce it yet.

Continuous Integration with TeamCity follow up

The presentation last night went really well. We had a steady stream of questions and there seemed to be general interest in the topic.

We talked about what Continuous Integration is and then I introduced a build configuration that I had pre-configured around a sample ASP.NET application. For some reason I couldn’t get the jabber notifications to work, but they had worked flawlessly before.

After talking with several people I’ve clarified a couple of points that will help the next time I present the talk, likely at the Iowa Code Camp. Thanks for all of the feedback and questions.

Here are the slides from the talk if you are interested.

Continuous Integration with TeamCity (and LiveMeeting)

Tomorrow I’m presenting “Continuous Integration with TeamCity” at CRineta. We’re starting off with the fundamentals of Continuous Integration and then we are going to configure TeamCity. We have an ASP.NET project in a Subversion repository that will be the subject of much of the demonstrations.

I love this topic and am excited to get to show this to the group.

We are also are going to broadcast this presentation over Live Meeting for the first time. Thanks to Josh Flory for getting this going and providing the Live Meeting account for our first run.

If you are interested in attending the Live Meeting, email me and I’ll hook you up. If you don’t have my email then contact me through the About page on my blog. Live Meeting will be a first for us, so there are no guarantees with the quality this time around.

By the way, if you are attending the (actual/physical) meeting remember that we are changing our location to Kirkwood. The directions are posted on CRineta.org.

Update: Here are the slides from the talk.

Iowa Code Camp – Des Moines

The summer is just about over and it’s time to ramp up for our second Iowa Code Camp of the year. This year’s code camp is going to held at the DMACC campus in West Des Moines on November 8th.

Greg Wilson put out a call for speakers a while ago. If you weren’t included on that email and want to speak, then email him at greg at solidrockstable dot com and he can help you out.

Javier Lozano has already lined up DMACC as our facility. If you haven’t been to their campus check out their website here. It’s an excellent high-tech facility and I think it will be a fantastic location. If you are interested in sponsoring the event please contact Javier Lozano as well at javier at lozanotek dot com.

To round out the list of leaders there is Greg Sohl (master of logistics), Bryan Sampica (marketing), Tom Burns and myself.

Microsoft in Iowa

It looks like Microsoft just picked Des Moines, Iowa for it next data center location. That is pretty cool for Des Moines and the state of Iowa. Des Moines is on I-80 which is close to some very high speed/high capacity fiber lines which I’m sure helped Microsoft make the decision.

New MVP in Eastern Iowa

A friend of mine, Arian Kulp, just received the Microsoft MVP award. Arian has been writing for Coding4Fun for quite some time, speaks up at CRIneta periodically and has produced a lot of content in the form of Hands-on-Labs and articles.

Bryan Sampica is the only other MVP that I know of in Eastern Iowa. Good job guys.

Web Development

I put in my notice at work 2 weeks ago and am actively searching for some cutting edge .Net web development work.

The last 2 1/2 years have been great with my current employer. I’ve learned a lot in the technology training space and have met many good people along the way, but it’s time to get back into full blown development.

Here is what I’m looking for:

Cutting edge web development (not necessarily bleeding edge)

Some flexibility in the work schedule.

A company that is as concerned with maintainability as they are with speed of development. Hopefully they are at least unit testing, using an automated build process with good source control.

A team environment would be preferable to a one man show.

Getting to mentor and periodically teach a class would be a big plus.

I would like to be working out of Iowa City, but that is optional if there is some work flexibility.

If you work at a place like this and are looking for a web developer, please contact me through my About page.

Iowa Crop Damage

The Daily Iowan is reporting that crop damages from the floods and related weather is going to cost the Iowa economy around $4 billion. That’s a lot of money by most anyone’s standards. What a tough year for farmers.

I sincerely hope that the Iowa economy is able to sustain this hit and still thrive.

May is a fine month in Iowa

We’ve had a bit more rain this May, but as I commented last year May is still a fine month in Iowa.