One of the Canadians at MIX11 was Imaginet’s Miguel Carrasco, whom you may have seen either speaking or track hosting last year at TechDays. He’s a developer, UI guy and Expression Blend MVP, and as such, the content of the MIX conference was exactly the kind of stuff that he was interested in. I caught him at the very end of the last day to talk about what he checked out at MIX, what he was up to at Imaginet, and the launch of Imaginet’s new service, Imaginet Interactive; it’s all captured in the video above.
A Shallow Pool
The subtitle of the Wall Street Journal article Mobile App Talent Pool is Shallow tells the story: “Companies Scramble for Engineers Who Can Write Software for Smartphones”. If you’ve got the mobile dev know-how, you can write your own ticket anywhere.
Some of the key take-aways of the article:
- Companies are competing fiercely with each other in an attempt to snap up mobile development talent – to the point where the competition is a “bottleneck”.
- The number of developers with mobile development skills isn’t enough to meet the demand, which has been increasing at a greater rate than for other types of development.
- The shortage of mobile talent means that companies are willing to find developers with promise and invest in getting them trained to develop mobile applications.
- The wages are good: average pay among mobile developers and designers is higher, with a Dice.com survey taken last fall reporting that experience mobile developers are raking in US$90K – $150K.
Deep Opportunities
If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, you know all about the importance of having a head start. The book is full of king-sized success stories, from Bill Gates to the Beatles to hockey players to big Manhattan lawyers, all of whom were passionate about something, honed their skills and then capitalized on that experience when the opportunities arose.
If you’re a .NET developer, Windows Phone is a “lining up of the planets” that represents an opportunity that you can capitalize on:
- You already have a head start on Windows Phone development! You use Visual Studio (either the full version or the free Express edition) as your IDE, familiar languages like C# and VB, and the .NET framework. If you’ve been working with Silverlight or XNA, you’re even father ahead of the game.
- You can stand out. The growth in the number of apps in Windows Phone’s marketplace is pretty impressive; about 12,000 since November and climbing fast. It’s the perfect opportunity for someone trying to make a name: small enough that you can make a splash, but big enough so that the splash you make actually matters.
- We’ve got your back. Microsoft has team of Windows Phone 7 “Champs”, whose mission is to make sure that you get the help, information and support as you write Windows Phone apps. As far as I know, the Esteemed Competition doesn’t have a team that has this level of support for developers building on their platforms.
Hackfests in Vancouver and Toronto Tomorrow
If you’ve been thinking about getting into Windows Phone development and you’re in the Vancouver or Toronto areas, you’re in luck – we’ve got free Windows Phone Hackfests in those cities tomorrow! These are events where you can learn about Windows Phone development, try your hand at it, and share ideas for apps. Here are the details:
- Vancouver’s Hackfest takes place this Saturday, April 16th from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. at BCIT Burnaby Campus (3700 Willingdon Avenue, Burnaby), Building SW3, Room 1710. This event is free – click here to register!
- Toronto’s Hackfest also takes place this Saturday, April 16th from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at the ObjectSharp offices (11 King Street West, Toronto), suite 1400. This event is free – click here to register!
Categories
Departure
“We enter as friends, we leave as friends,” said Mark Relph, then the VP of Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Group as we did my final interview in early October 2008. I started just under a fortnight later, on October 20th, and for the past two and a half years, I have proudly held the title of Developer Evangelist, representing Microsoft to Canadian software developers, and in turn, advocating for Canadian software developers to Microsoft Canada. If you have read anything I’ve written, caught any of my presentations or seen me evangelize, you will know that it is a job that I love and enjoy wholeheartedly.
Mark may have gone off to Redmond to join the mother ship, but his declaration still holds true. I will leave Microsoft as a friend next week on Friday, April 22nd.
If life is change, then I’ve had life by the truckload over the past few months. I’ll spare you the details here (if you really must know, it’s best done in person and over a pint or two), but it should be plenty to simply say that if I were a more “New Age” sort of person, I’d say that the universe has been dropping hints that I really need to shake things up. Hence my departure, something I would never have predicted a mere six months ago. Life’s like that.
Mine is still a great job. I could’ve spent the past few weeks just winding down and wrapping up, but I love this job too much to do that. I enjoy it enough to keeping “Bringing the Awesome”, right to my last minute on my last day next week. Everything I wrote in the “Now Hiring” post when we were looking for a new evangelist back in October remains the same.
What’s changed is me, and I’ve got to go and follow a different path. If and when the opening to fill my position appears, go check it out – you might find that it’s the job for you. It comes with my highest recommendation, and if you’ve got the skills and inclination, I’d tell you to go for it.
I’m going to wax a little more poetic in a blog post on my final day at the job. For now, I’d like to say that it’s been an honour, a privilege and a joy to have worked at Microsoft. I have worked with bright and talented people on interesting and important projects with some amazing gear, in cities all over Canada. I’ve learned a lot: not just about Microsoft’s tools and technologies, but also about the problems they solve, the customers they serve, the corporation that makes them and the industry said corporation is part of. I am a better geek, a better public speaker, a better writer, a better performer and even a better person for my experiences at Microsoft. For all this and more, they will always have my gratitude. I entered as a friend two and a half years ago, and next week, I leave as one.
Thank you, Microsoft. It’s been a great journey.
One of the highlights of the Day Two keynote at the MIX conference was the Kinect presentation, where we showed off a number of things that were possible with the upcoming Kinect API for Windows. One of the projects was Clint Rutkas’ Jellybean, a Kinect-controlled lounge chair (pictured above) that can be driven and reclined using only hand motions.
Later that day, Scott Hanselman interviewed Clint on Channel 9 Live and asked if he could take Jellybean for a test run. Clint obliged, and anticipating some YouTube-worthy hilarity, whipped out my Windows Phone and shot the video below:
We brought in a handful of guests to join us at the MIX conference, one of whom was our good friend Morten Rand-Hendriksen, whom you may know from his work designing gorgeous sites or perhaps from meeting him at last year’s Make Web Not War in Montreal. He’s an interesting guy with interests ranging from metal guitar to photography to ballroom dancing to performing Rihanna numbers at karaoke bars, and that diversity of experience is also reflected in his work, what with his mixing of open source technologies and using tools like Expression Web. In fact, he’s an Expression Web MVP.
Having come from the world of open source programming languages and technologies myself, I know that too few people spend much time in each other’s worlds. The open source geeks tend to stay in their own camps, and ditto for the .NET nerds. We thought it might be an interesting learning experience to invite Morten to MIX and immerse him in the most suitable-for-him conference: after all, this is Microsoft’s most web-centric, designer-oriented gathering.
His impressions so far? Pretty good, from the sound of his most recent blog entry, titled MIX11 – Day One Recap. Here’s the “money excerpt”:
Not to sound like a crazy cheer leader or anything, but the future looks bright. Or to put it in my own humble terms: Microsoft has seen the light and is accepting what we have known all along: Web standards and open source is where the future lies.
You can read the whole thing over at his blog, Design is Philosophy.
Categories
Trouble, Inc.!
Nothing good can come from this. Here are Scott Hanselman, Miguel de Icaza and Phil Haack, hanging out right by the Channel 9 Live soundstage at the MIX conference, working away on something so very wrong that Scott can’t conceal the guilty look on his face.
The Channel 9 soundstage is where they’re holding interviews all through the day at MIX – tune in to live.visitmix.com to see them!