MIX!
This isn’t exactly news, but regardless, I am very excited. Please bear with me.
I am well aware that this may not mean anything to anyone that may read this blog, but I have something special to announce. I have waited at least a month to say this, but I am very excited to announce that in less than 2 weeks, I will be making a trip to Las Vegas, Nevada! I was lucky enough to receive a free ticket to MIX, a Microsoft conference that has a strong focus on the correlation between current internet technologies and design. The talks are presented by very high-profile speakers in the industry, and I actually follow a lot of these guys on twitter, or I subscribe to their blogs on Google Reader.
The code that I write is lagely inspired by the things that these people write! I know it’s super nerdy but c’mon!
I am not only excited to make my first trip to the real Vegas, but I am really looking forward to the chance to network with some of these bigwigs in the industry. I can’t believe that this opportunity just fell in my lap out of nowhere. At the same time, however, I am extremely humbled at the fact that I will be representing my company (along with my CEO and boss) at such a huge technology event. I have even considered entering in a Rock Band competition. 
Besides the fact that I haven’t worked with very many web-based technologies as of late, I still believe that I have an interest in where a lot of the current trends are going. For example, I have been doing Silverlight 2 work on and off, as well as giving talks at SoCal Code Camps and participating in Silverlight labs in Irvine. Most of the talks that I am planning on attending are either Silverlight 3 or Expression Blend related, and I have been advocating on the behalf of Silverlight almost nonstop since it was released a few months ago.
It’s time to switch to the dark side, Actionscript Nazis!
Wow… haha. But seriously, all joking aside, I think that this year’s MIX Conference will be extremely rewarding and I’m very lucky to be given the chance to attend such an event so early on in my career. To make this blog post that much more boring, here are some of the sessions that I am planning on attending:
- What’s New in Microsoft Silverlight 3
- Integrating Microsoft Expression Blend with Adobe Creative Suite
- How’d they do it? Real App. Real Code. Two Weeks. Nothing but .NET (Scott Hanselman!!!)
- From Concept to Production: Microsoft Expression Blend
- User Experience Design Patterns for Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 3
- Consuming Web Services in Microsoft Silverlight 3
- Deep Zoom++ : Build Dynamic Deep Zoom application with Open Source
- Touch and Gesture Computing, What You Haven’t Heard (Joseph Fletcher!!!)
I’d like to add that almost all my former classmates from school do web-based work with their companies, while I have done hardly any web-based work so far at all.
So… yeah, it’ll be nice to rub it in their faces when I get to meet a lot of these famous Microsoft people face-to-face.
Haaaaah, it’ll be great.