Blogging Stuff

Just in case anyone was following/caring, I had started a few multi-part series posts that kind of fizzled out and I felt I owed the 3 of you who cared an explanation:

• Agile Arguments: No one seemed to pick up or care about this one. I have a two half-written parts to this, but I'm not going to flog myself to finish them if there's no interest.
• Pablo's Topic of the Month for April: Design Patterns - no one else chimed in on this one. April was rough for a lot of people and we just didn't get it done. Sorry folks :(  We're human. We may try something for May, or pick it up again in June with a new topic (hopefully something that requires a little less investment so we can get back up to speed)

I think I might back away from heady posts altogether and get back to more code/task-oriented posts. There's a ton of stuff out there and I'd like to start doing some real-world minutiae stuff with some test-driven design, IoC, or other stuff I preach sneakily thrown in there in the hopes that that might be a more effective strategy for getting people excited about some of these accelerators I have found.

Community Stuff

CodingDojo

The next incarnation of the TDD CodingDojo was planned for April, but my job situation + ALT.NET Seattle threw a wrench in that. May turned out to be for similar reasons. So the current plan is some time in June (hopefully early). We'll see. Several of you have offered to help set up something and we (and I think I can speak for the Los Techies crew here) really appreciate the offer and we'll probably be calling on you sometime soon.

Screencasts

I recorded a screencast with Ben Scheirman a few weekends ago and it worked out pretty well, I thought. Unfortunately there was some temporal distortion between our two audio streams, and last I checked he was slogging it out doing some grunt work to get it straightened out (thanks Ben!)  If anyone knows why one audio stream slowly gets out of sync with the other (i.e. about 1 second every few minutes), we'd appreciate some help.

Ray Houston and Jimmy Bogard just recorded a screencast and it's coming together nicely in post-production. Look for one of them (hopefully) to post about this soon (great job guys!)

I'd encourage all four of you who read my blog to consider doing a screencast.  It's a lot easier to do it in person, so if you're in Austin maybe we could set something up together?

DotNetSlackers and other sites

The crew over at DotNetSlackers.com are doing some pretty cool things and they're asking for folks to help write articles, send in snippets, etc. I going to *try* to do some of these in the near future (I keep promising Sonu, but never following up -- sorry man).

I'd like to suggest anyone who has even simple snippets or interesting ASP.NET MVC usage examples, or maybe even NHibernate 101 stuff, contributing it to DotNetSlackers to further the art. They're clamoring for high quality content and they're even willing to PAY for content! Yes, that's right, pay! :) It's in your professional as well as personal interests to contribute to a site like this (disclaimer: I have no affiliation with this site other than being an occasional forum poster and I received no money or other compensation to say any of this -- I just like the site).