Many times I’ve given up on the idea of posting about something because I though: "hmm… why should I post about that? People may think it was a stupid post, because everybody should know about this or the other…". At Alt.net I heard others expressing the same feeling.

I read some posts out there that are so insightful and in-depth that makes me think why post anything when there’s already a lot of great material posted by others.

I think I was looking at this from the wrong perspective.

For one thing, every once in a while I see one of my guru bloggers post about some little thing that I’ve known for years, and I’m like "hmmm, dang… I should have posted about that".  🙂

Another thing is the discoverability of the information. For instance, people that come to my blog are usually people who…

1. …have seen me presenting at conferences or user groups, or
2. …have read my articles, or
3. …are my clients, or
4. …come from the Visual FoxPro community, and knew me from there

All these people may not know about some of the great bloggers out there that I follow, or may not see the relevance of some of the information available out there, or it can even be that the information is presented in such a way that’s not easy for people to grasp, so I think it’s a good idea for me to aggregate some of this information, with links, comments, etc., and present it to my readers in the way I see fit (I mean, I may be able to find some way to make it a little easier for others to understand something important posted by other bloggers).

And last but not least, I can always come back to my own blog to search for things I may not know off the top of my head all the time.  🙂

So the bottom line here is: blog away! A simple post of yours pointing to somebody else’s post with a little comment as to why you think it is important may be very helpful for your readers.

A few weeks back I blogged about Alt.Net in Austin. I had said I’d be posting other entries with more specific thoughts about things I got from there. So here’s one…  🙂

The first session I got to attend to was the one where people discussed mostly how to motivate developers (such as 501 developers) so to get them more passionate about their job; usually people who are passionate about what they do are much more productive and produce code of much better quality (besides being fun to work with).

When I do my presentations or training gigs, I always get good feedback from people saying they enjoy me speaking because they can tell I’m very passionate about what I’m talking about. Usually not only I enjoy the topic I’m presenting on, but I also cannot let go the great feeling of having learned about something that some people may find complicated to grasp, and make others understand it.

I was glad to hear that a bunch of other people have been hosting brown bag meetings at their companies. I’ve blogged about that not long ago. I really like brown bag meetings. These meeting are not at all about people trying to show off; it is actually all about being so excited about something you’ve learned that you can’t help but let other people know about it. It is also about being frustrated with something that you’ve been struggling with and you want to run it by others that may be able to help you. Of course, the latter is a good exercise for putting all your pride aside and say "hey, I’m stuck! I have no idea what the heck I have to do to fix or implement this.".

Now, if a person can’t get excited about anything to a point of feeling like sharing it with others, what can I say… maybe the person should go work with something else. Because I usually have so much fun doing my job, I really can’t relate well to somebody who works out of obligation. That’d bore me to death, and I just can’t do it. At every situation where I would wake up and hate the fact that I had to go to work, I’d just make one out of the two obvious (at least to me) choices: A, try to change something, B, change jobs.

On the other hand, if somebody doesn’t ever get frustrated with things that the person can’t figure out, wow! I mean, does such person exist? With the myriad of new tools, technologies, techniques, etc., it’s is just impossible for somebody to know anything.

I’m always thinking of ideas as to how I could get people more passionate about the job we do, but of course it does take a lot of perseverance to actually implement and move forward with some of the ideas and insist on it, analyzing what works and what doesn’t, etc.

One of the things mentioned at this session at Alt.Net is that a person who acts like a catalyst should not put all of the effort into doing everything alone. Such approach does not scale well. There’s only so much an individual can do by him of herself. A better approach would be to plant this seed onto others, so that they also become catalyst type of people, and that way, the fire spreads out much quicker and stronger.

It’s like many years ago, when I received my first MVP award. I remember some people on the community saying something like "wow, so now that you’re an MVP, what’s next?". My reply to that was: "I’ll continue working with the community, and one of my goals is to help others become MVPs". This same mentality has been always something I try to bring into the companies I work for. Some people joined the ride along the way and still thank me for all the help (even after all these years), and some people couldn’t care less. I’m okay with that. As long as I can get one person to carry the torch on I’m happy. It’s a great feeling to know that you’ve made a difference in somebody else’s life; it doesn’t matter how big or small that difference was. 🙂

Bottom line is: are you having fun with your job? If so, get others contaminated with it. If not, see if there’s anything you could do to change the situation. If you don’t even feel like proposing and pursuing changes, consider going back to square one and finding something else to do with your life. Maybe you have other talents that’d be best used if you had fun using it.  🙂

Last weekend I drove up to Austin for the Alt.Net conference. It was well worth the trip. It had been many years since the last time I went to a conference where I would not be a speaker. I’ve signed up for this conference because of the proposed "open space" format, where the attendees were the ones managing what sessions they wanted to see, and each session was pretty much an open-ended discussion. There weren’t sessions where the speaker would walk through a typical presentation, showing drag-and-grop operations on a cool new product. Instead, a topic would be proposed, the topic’s proponent would throw in a few words to get the session going, and anybody could contribute to the discussion, with questions, opinions, etc.

What attracted me to this conference was the amount of brain power that was going to be there. A number of bloggers and people whose opinion I value were going to be there, so I figured maybe I could learn something through osmosis.  🙂

Different from regular conferences, where the speaker usually walks the attendees through a specific problem, and then shows how to address the problem, at Alt.net a session may end without a clear solution or recommendation being identified. And this is good because it stimulates the attendees to think and discuss through scenarios of the real world, instead of being taken through one of the possible solutions, which is usually a lot biased by the speaker’s personal experience and point-of-view. Hearing different scenarios, solutions, and questions from people coming from very different background is refreshing because it teaches you to think a lot more out of the box.

I’ll be posting some other entries with some thoughts based on some notes I’ve made for myself while I was there. These are things that stuck the most to my brain, so I’m blogging about it even for my own sake so that I don’t forget about it (I’ve made notes in my PocketPC, and I lost the notes after having to put the device through a hard reset…).

I’m definitely looking forward to other editions of Alt.net! By the way, even though some people had the idea that the conference would have an "anti-Microsoft" feel to it, it wasn’t like that at all. Actually, there was a big number of Microsoft employees there, including Scott Guthrie, who showed the new MVC framework for .NET first-hand at this conference. Very cool!

If you just do a quick search on the web you’re going to find a lot of blog posts from other people who attended the conference, so make sure you do that to get more details about it (different people absorbed different ideas, so it’s good to get different point of views out there).

Hey, just got an email from Microsoft to let me know that I’ve received the Microsoft MVP Award for 2008! It is refreshing to know that there’s somebody paying attention to the work I do with the community, mostly doing presentations at conferences and user groups. The reward sure keeps me motivated to keep doing it.

This is the 7th year in a row that I receive the award. Last year I though it had been my 5th year, but it was actually the 6th. Man, time sure flies by.  🙂