Monthly Archives: June 2009

Open Source Bridge 2009 Trip Report

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Open Source Bridge Logo

Last week, I attended the Open Source Bridge conference in Portland. It’s a volunteer-run conference that came about because OSCON moved to San Jose this year. They had a great turnout and the organizers did an amazing job, especially for a first time, volunteer conference.

I was most impressed with Selena Deckelmann (co-chair of OSBridge) and her ability to network and organize this event. She had an initial goal of 50% female speakers (and to think this is for an Open Source conference). She was able to get 30% female speakers using the same quality bar as the guys. Now that’s networking.

To Selena, THANK YOU!!! Finally someone who truly, truly, truly gets the Women in Technology issue. It is a breath of fresh air to see someone really do something about this.

Highlights

  • I started off my CodePlex talk mentioning how Selena accepted my talk because “peeking into CodePlex might give you ideas that you can embrace and extend.” I said, “Because of this, Microsoft has instructed me that you all will have to sign these NDAs.”  The room erupted in laughter. I am the stuff of legend, trying to get an OSS audience to sign Microsoft NDAs.
  • Got called “the queen of open source at Microsoft” after my talk: http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/06/welcome-to-codeplex.html
  • Spent 2 hours at lunch chatting with faculty and staff of Ohio State University doing research into OSS communities and their behaviors. This area of HCI is like crack cocaine to me, so I definitely enjoyed chatting theories of human behavior and gaming the system.
  • Had a geek dinner in Portland for the local .NET User Group to share my stories of the day.

Lowlights

  • Only real lowlight was that I could only spend a day there. Our boss gives us one day a week to work on a pet project, so i used that day to drive down to Portland to give talks. =) 

Why I seriously have a phobia of plants

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At the INETA party during TechEd 09, I told my “Uncle Jimmy Stories” for nearly 4 hours. Since I’ve had quite a few people ask me to blog these stories (and even more ask me to share photos), I’d thought I’d share my “kick-off” story of my childhood – why I (seriously) have a phobia of plants. Yes, ordinary household plants cause my blood pressure to skyrocket, and even the thought of just watering a plant makes me want to have a root canal instead. Here’s why…

Uncle Jimmy had a garden when I was little.

Now I need to pause for a moment to explain Uncle Jimmy. When I was 7, he moved into the shed behind the house, where he slept on a waterbed that would freeze in the winter. We had to run an extension cord from the house to the shed, so he could sleep on top of an electric blanket.

As I said, Uncle Jimmy had a garden when I was little.

He decided to experiment with a new way to grow the plants and vegetables. Now, my guess as an adult would be he tried to use oil. But oh no, that would be way too easy and simple.

Electricity. He tried to shock! the plants and vegetables into growth. He ran electric wires criss-cross throughout the garden. I was told as a little child (4 or 5 years old) to never, ever go near the garden or much less let the plants touch me, or I could get electrocuted. I must have seen him water the plants without turning off the electricity as a small child. Why else would I rather a root canal than to pour water into a little plant pot.

And to this day, plants stress me out.

How to view stats for the entire lifetime of a CodePlex project – #043

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If this tip comes as a surprise to anyone, please let me know, as we have a major usability issue on our hands =D

For any CodePlex project, you can go to the stats tab, and select “project lifetime”

Stats for a project's lifetime

And you can get total traffic summary info at the bottom.

Traffic Summary for Lifetime of Project

i was going to play the game “who can guess which project this is” but the referring traffic kinda gives it away.

CodePlex – Free as in Beer

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Last week, I spoke at Microsoft DevDays 2009 in The Netherlands. After the conference, I was able to do a little sightseeing in Amsterdam on my own, which included buying a small souvenir from the Heineken Plant, a CodePlex labeled Heineken bottle.

CodePlex labeled Heineken bottle next to a Koala bear's butt Outside the Heineken Brewery with CodePlex flag

The conference was held at The Hague (which btw is a city, and not a building). We had beautiful weather for the conference, so I was very happy to get a chance to go out to the beach and grab some photos.

Sandcastles on the beach at The Hauge

Since i grew up on a coast beach facing South, I’ve never seen a sunset on the water before.

a sunset on the water at The Hauge

And one picture to prove I did actual work instead of just sightseeing, I tried to capture just how large the 400 seat room was, but alas, my poor little camera just couldn’t handle it. To give you an idea, there were 3 projection screens from behind the stage, and 6 monitors within the audience.

the DevDays room i spoke in was quite large

How to find a specific user’s profile page – #042

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Currently, there isn’t a way on the site to search for users via their usernames. However, if you know someone’s username, you can access their profile directly by typing in

http://www.codeplex.com/site/users/view/<username>

Or, if you’re like me and can’t remember that link, here’s an alternative way to look up someone else’s profile. First, click on any CodePlex project, go to the people tab, and click on any username, just to get to a profile page.

image

Next, remove the current username from the address bar and enter the new username. for example, you can change

http://www.codeplex.com/site/users/view/saraford

to

http://www.codeplex.com/site/users/view/JustinJosefAngel 

Enjoy!