My Top 10 Personal Community Goals for 2007
It's really hard for me to believe that 2006 has come and gone. All the things that I was able to accomplish and all the hard work. It's amazing that it was just 14 months ago that I became the President of Tulsa .NET Users Group when then President Caleb Jenkins, who had done so much for the group, relocated to Dallas to become our regional Developer Evangelist.
Now as the New Year begins I am setting goals to go above and beyond last year.
1. TulsaCodeCamp.com - first annual event - March 10th 2007! Very low key sponsorship - focused on the code, with heavy emphasis this year on .NET 3.0 - Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).
2. TulsaTechFest 2007 - to make our 2nd Tulsa TechFest even better than last year! We will have a finalized date within the next few days, so we can begin booking speakers. I personally would like to see the attendance numbers double this year. It really shouldn't be that difficult! Just need a team of volunteers from the beginning this time so we can accomplish more together.
3. DallasCodeCamp.com - present here again. This year's event is 4/21/07.
4. Little Rock's TechExpo - I had hoped to present at this year's Tech Expo, but I've just learned they will probably do a Code Camp at some point this year instead. So, I will hope to get over there then or was invited to speak at one of their regular meetings. After our 4th baby is born, I'll have to head that way.
5. Continue growing our User Groups: TulsaDevelopers.NET, Tulsa SQL Server Group, Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group, Tulsa Java Developers Group and starting in February our newest group Tulsa DOTNETNUKE Users Group. I would like to see approximately double the attendance at each of these meetings. I am working on a marketing plan now to make this happen.
6. I plan on adding at least 3 or 4 additional presentation titles/topics to my list. Starting with all the .NET 3.0 topics and then branching out from there, possibly digging into SharePoint 3.0.
7. Continue helping out at the international level as much as I can, by continuing my work with INETA.org, since I became the Assistant VP Speaker's Bureau last July and am now working on a some special projects for the community there as well.
8. North East Oklahoma Technology Council - something that I thought of and the TulsaDevelopers.NET Board of Directors help really iron out the details. This organization will be an incubator for any technology related User Groups in our region. More details coming soon!
9. I have been working with Jason Townsend and we will be launching the Bartlesville .NET Users Group very soon! More details to follow.
10. Finally, to finish the 10, to give as much back (as always) to the community as possible, but with an emphasis on the most bang for the buck - via code samples, articles, etc. Stay tuned as I iron out the details.
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About dwalker
David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.
His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.
After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.
Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.
He is the current President of the
Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.