Now I have ALL of the Microsoft developer certifications – long journey is over!!!

Now I own the full deck of the Microsoft certifications and I can sit back and relax (beer is in order . Unfortunately, in the startup world that I operate most of the time, it’s not very recognizable achievement, but it’s nice to put these logos on my presentation slide decks and, especially now, I have a very powerful bragging rights – I have ALL of the Microsoft developers certifications !!!

It was a lengthy path and, I should add, a very confusing one. It wasn’t very obvious what certification is a prerequisite to which one and, I must add, I’ve made a couple of mistakes on the road until I’ve discovered a developer’s certification map by Jorgen Thelin that put everything in order and cleared all the confusions.

WCF Certification (70-503) is mine!!! Now I’m a certified (MCPD) Enterprise Application Developer

If you were wondering why there was a silence on my blog – I was preparing for a battle with the Prometric testing computer And I Won!!! Last week I’ve passed my LAST (for the near future) certification exam: Windows Communication Foundation. This gave me another MCT certification -

And finally enabled my long overdue certification MCPD Enterprise Application Developer.

To those who are looking into passing this certification you may use the following materials that I found very helpful (after the break):

GTD: Getting your inbox to zero

Tremendously loved the 43folders podcast, delivered at Google,  about how to manage your Inbox and keep it empty. My advise – follow this religiously. It keeps your life easy, manageably and organized.

[Series 1] Inbox Zero – Google Tech Talk  (permalink is not really working, so use the link to MP3 directly)

43folders RSS Feed

Microsoft Certified Trainer

Last week got my MCT certification.   Celebration is in order …

Challenge your teams to be better

This is the phrase that Jeff Sutherland, one of the inventors of the Agile methodology Scrum, has ended his “A Practical Roadmap to a Great Scrum” presentation at Agile Bazaar meet up this Thursday. Couldn’t agree more. In our day and age of the developer’s ignorance and mediocracy we have to find ways to make them to improve. What is the best way to do this?

Developers love challenge. We breathe and eat challenge multiple times every day. So, why not to pose the general improvement as a challenge in front of a team and in front of each and every developer on the team? I, personally, love the idea.

“Non coding architects are fired”, said Jeff. Awesome! Would love to add to that one thing: in my eyes the non-coding architects are as real as Pegasus (as I’ve heard one of the attendees of the recent Norwegian Developers Conference has put on his t-shirt). All this resonates with the interview of Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob Martin) by Scott Hanselman (Hanselminutes #171) when they’ve talked about developer’s professionalism.

Bob says that our industry is very young and we’re not yet developed our own professional rituals and discipline. He differentiates ritual from discipline by a simple fact that rituals has actions not backed up by science and explanations, but still very effective in what they provide as disciplines. He adds that Agile development, as a discipline, a great driver forward for the industry to mature and for developers to claim “professionalism”. In addition to that, mentoring should be added as a first class citizen into the expertise development at all levels of the organizations in the industry. The same way, as you don’t want to be in a plain flown by a junior pilot, you don’t want your medical record to be managed by a software developed by a junior developer.

Me, personally, is very happy that there are a lot of different factors from the industry itself and from the co-aligned ones that start to push developers and, hopefully, their management into the process improvement. Little by little we’ll change the industry into a mature one that can ensure professionalism at all levels and niches.

Last, but not least, Software Architects should not only code but be the first ones to learn new processes that improve the quality of the development teams and the processes they follow. They should be the ones to implement them and mentor the rest of their teams. They should hone their expertise and their teams as the Samurais hone their swords.

Push yourself and people around you to be better. Challenge everyone and yourself to be better and what you do. Mentor and transfer your knowledge.

I challenge everyone to participate in the community events. Let’s share our expertise and our knowledge.

Google’s Data Centers revealed

Finally after years of secrecy Google unveiled the design of their modular data centers. Apparently they are designed to be 99.9% efficient. I’m a bit skeptical about this number, but, what I really liked, is that the whole center is built from a set of exactly the same modular containers (containing 1,160 servers each) that can be turned on and of separately or moved to a desired location. So not only servers can be switched/replaced but the portions of the data center. The data center modularization is taken to the extreme – the best scalability solution I’ve ever seen.

Read more and see a video of a server on Engaged and an on CNET.

Principles for Scalable Service Design

I’m preparing a presentation for the upcoming CodeCamp about the best practices in building enterprise system that can scale to the cloud and stumbled on a real gem – the Dr. Werner Vogels Availability & Consistency presentation during QCon 2007. For those who doesn’t know – Dr. Werner Vogels is VP & CTO at Amazon.com.

In this presentation Dr. Vogels in crystal clear way lays out all the principals that I was a big promoter for the last 10 years. I agree with him on 100,000% and really think that the future is with the BASE scalable systems (and not with ACID) simply because ACID propagates the error to the end user whereas BASE system deals with errors locally. I do agree that in some rare cases ACID is the easier and cheaper way to go, but still sure that even those cases is possible to implement as BASE system.

The Dr. Vogels recipie for success is build system following this menu:

• Autonomy
• Asynchrony
• Controlled concurrency
• Controlled parallelism
• Decentralize
• Decompose into small well-understood building blocks
• Failure tolerant
• Local responsibility
• Recovery Built-in
• Simplicity
• Symmetry

Balsamiq – great GUI mockup tool

Whole day worked on GUI mockups for our new product – love it!

Check Balsamiq out!

Microsoft places stamp of approval on Vista-based Ion SFF PCs

 

Nvidia makes me happier every day.

I’m curious – when does my Windows phone will run Vista? 

We have one more MCPD: Windows Developer 3.5

Received MCPD: Windows Developer 3.5 certification.

I deserve a long overdue drink!