I’ve recently upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 and modified the theme.
There is a project at Digital Realty Trust that we are developing and will use WordPress as the selected platform. Now, I’ll have more working knowledge about WP while I manage this project.
So far I like 2.7. I’ve since downloaded the WordPress app to my iPhone and am writing this entry from my iPhone.
I encourage you to upgrade if you’re running WordPress.
I successfully navigated my first year at DreamForce (the annual Salesforce.com event of the year).
I had heard that you can get any one of 100,001 things from DreamForce, so my objective was to go and learn as much as I could about VisualForce and Apex. I’m certain I succeeded in reaching that goal.
Monday was a 14 hour day that included registration, the big keynote from the Salesforce.com CEO, session after session of learning, a two-hour hack-athon on the new Force.com Sites technology and ended with a Foo Fighters concert.
Tuesday was a 12 hour day that included several hands-on sessions with the Force.com platform, two keynotes and the nations presidential election.
Wednesday was a day of dragging yourself from session to session learning new things.
I can’t put scale to this event in words. I do know there were close to 10,000 people there, so you can only imagine the size of the keynote room that could accommodate 10,000 people (sitting nonetheless).
Regretfully, I didn’t get to sit the Admin certification exam, but I did pick up a voucher for a free certification exam soon.
In sum, it was great experience, I learned a lot, and I’m looking forward to the next one.
I’ve recently finished a new e-commerce website.
kellykaycreative dot com
Technologies include:
Link to article by Salesforce.com CEO – Marc Benioff
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/08/01/welcome-to-web-30-now-your-other-computer-is-a-data-center/
The following is just a bulleted list of responses to both the article and user comments.
Agree – Web 3.0: Anyone Can Innovate
* A lot of people use it. It becomes a plague. Then people don’t use it. Look at the number of blogs that have the digg, reddit, stumbleupon, bookmark and delicious icons at the end of each post. Do you really use those links?Untethered Innovation = del.icio.us then digg.com then reddit then stumbleupon then buzz up. How many of those do you use to its fullest potential?
* Look at SFDC. I run an org of 70 users and it is amazing how people will sit in a meeting and stress how important an app like SFDC is to our company as a whole, then not use it. The only way employees end up using it is when the executives hold a gun to their head or their salaries are tied to the data in the system.
* We in the development and IT world need to get over ourselves and realize the day-to-day employees making the world’s largest companies run do not know what RSS is, don’t know how to post to an ftp server, will have a completely different definition of the term “cloud” than you might expect, have never heard of any Web 2.0 app, don’t know that an app running Ruby, AJAX and XAML can help anything or even how to insert a picture into a Microsoft Word document. They don’t understand the name of the application – joomla!, xoop, twitter, mint, jiglu, drupal, doof, iubo – much less how to use the functionality offered by such an app. Even if you do get them to use it, they inevitably come to one thing – one tiny, tiny obstacle – in the app they cannot overcome and they completely abandon it; give up on it and say “its too hard!” Innovation, therefore, becomes a vicious cycle.
* Marc is right, Web 3.0 is “the stuff of revolution.” Out of chaos, will come order (because someone will see profit in bringing order). Then there will be chaos again, then order.
* We end up with a very, very crowded marketplace. Look at this Web 2.0 directory – http://www.go2web20.net/ – and think about how many of those little apps do something very, very similar to the next only slightly different. In the end, we are going to get a ton of apps that do one thing slightly different than the next. They become a solution looking for a problem and that, my friend, is not innovation.
* We only buy the “shiny thing”. SaaS was, and is, the latest “shiny thing”. Business executives who don’t understand the cloud, what it takes to develop apps or the damage that can be done to thier company if the app is not properly used, feel as though they must have these technologies running their companies and, if not, they are considered ‘innefective leaders with a lack to innovate.
* When the world was small, we could understand it. I don’t like the way people can anonymously sit behind a computer monitor and tear apart someone eles’ attempt to make things understood; like Benioff is doing here. We in the development and IT world are the main culprits. But, then again, that is Web 2.0, isn’t it?
I’ve added a new category for posts to help organize examples of my work.
I plan to post images with short descriptions.
Check out my portfolio posts here.
I must say, I didn’t know there were so many political moves one must make to upgrade a web hosting environment.
Technically, it is a sound move. Windows Server 2008, IIS 7 and .NET 3.5 are the latest generation Windows OS and web hosting environment. The site I am managing isn’t even that complex of a site.
Politically, it seems there are so many people you have to “sell” in order to make the move.
That’s fine, but it is teaching me a skill I didn’t think I would learn while trying to upgrade a web hosting environment – create a win for a customer, create a win for someone internally, and create a win for myself.
All good skills, I must say, but I never would have thought I would be honing the above skill this way.
I’ve completed an instructor-led course on the introductory topics in C#. The application of choice was, of course, Visual Studio 2005.
This fits nicely with my SQL Server 2005 course and adds ASP.NET programming to my skill set.
I’ve completed an instructor-led class on MS SQL Server 2005.
So far this class has turned out to be quite timely. We are discussing a web application that shows power consumption data stored, of course, in a SQL database. We have only discussed this app being available on our company intranet. But I expect that it will public as the app expands in scope. At that time, I’ll be sure to post an example.
Things I have learned so far:
- there is a delicate balance how sophisticated your app is and the performance of your database query results. I like to review highscalability.com to here the developers that work on applications like Amazon, Facebook, Flickr, etc. talk about the millions of transactions they have per second and how their chosen architecture performs.
- virtualization is a fantastic invention. Being able to work with my IT group via a virtual machine has beneficial. Speaking from a developers standpoint, I can see how it aids in getting apps built and deployed quickly.
Owning a Business
Do you remember when you were in grade school english class and the teacher made you start every class with writing a journal entry based on a prompt? There is one entry in particular that I found when going through one of my old journals where I detail a business plan for sports memorabilia (e.g. baseball cards, autographed helmets, authentic jerseys, etc.). To own and operate my own business has been a part of me for a very long time. I like business, but am limited by my own intelligence and I constantly get frustrated by my own ambition and desires. e.g. my ambition far exceeds my intelligence.
Work Experience
January 2007 – Present
I now work for Digital Realty Trust – http://www.digitalrealtytrust.com – as the Marketing Information Systems Manager. We lease out datacenter space to companies like Facebook, Yahoo, UBS Financial, BP, MySpace, etc.
There are four of us in the Marketing department and my role includes:
May 2004 – December 2007
I started my career working at Starr Tincup. What an experience it was! I was there 3 1/2 years and, at the end of my time there, realized that I was way out of my league. The people there at Starr Tincup set an entirely different bar for hard work and intelligence. I am glad that I was part of it and got to help build parts of the company. However, it was definitely disengaging and deflating to come this self-realization, but I knew because of my own personal limitations that I would never become Partner in the firm and, therefore, agreed that it was my time to move on. For my first job, I couldn’t have had a better opportunity and I still thank the Principals for affording me the chance to work there.
Here is a bullet-point highlight of my tenure at Starr Tincup:
There were two significant layoffs in my tenure at Starr Tincup and for some reason I seem to have found a way to survive both. There are millions of people smarter than I, but I seem to have been doing the right kind of work in our worst kind of times as a business and, thus, made it through the layoffs.
Ideas
I put a lot of effort into my ideas. Most people call me one of the more reflective people they have ever known and that comes out in my ideas and recommendations that I put forth.
People
I like people that are diligent; that are smart enough to challenge an idea on the fly; that have the critical thinking skills to understand the ‘why’ in a business strategy.
I can not count the number of MS Project plans I have created. Some seem to go on for hundreds and hundreds of tasks and some seem to get the job done in less than 50.
I’ve realized, though, that many times people just want the comfort of knowing that a file exists. Furthermore, the people that want that comfort are inevitably the people that end up deviating from the plan or making changes.
Project Management, without being too exhaustive here, isn’t the ability to just build a list of all the tasks that need to get done; it is the ability to know the ripple effects of any changes to your plan, it is the ability to know when to be a little more forgiving and when to be more strict, it is the ability to know when your project is in jeopardy, it is the ability to know how to change your project around completely and still hit deadline and budget, it is the ability to know where you can give and where you must take.