Lotusphere 2008 presentations all zipped up on ls08.net

Earlier today, the nice folks running www.ls08.net zipped up all the Lotusphere 2008 presentations by track for your downloading convenience. Hit the ls08.net homepage and click the PDF Download tab. (Lotusphere online username and password required.)

Get 'em while they're hot. Only three weeks left before the ls08 site goes down.

Lotusphere Presentation Batch Download

Thank you to Stephan Wissel for posting instructions to download all the Lotusphere 2008 presentations in one go. If you attended Lotusphere and would like to keep a library of all the various presentations, check out this entry on wissel.net.

Live from the jamfest

Man I can't believe how much musical talent there is at Lotusphere. I am
lovin' Jamfest this year! The new venue is great and the music is AWESOME!

Rock on!
«« Sent via Blackberry »»

Do you bleed yellow?

If you haven't seen it yet, you must take a moment right now to go to BleedYellow.com.

Nice job Lotus911.

Lotusphere Twitter

Want another way to stay in the loop at Lotusphere? Chris Miller of IdoNotes.com has set up a Lotusphere Twitter for all of us.

Click through and join in the fun!

Sometimes sharing a server can cause confusion

I simply couldn't resist. Seriously though, Google's a little confused.

Lotusphere 2008 Online is up!

It's at http://www.ls08.net/. If you haven't seen your email yet, the username is your registration email address and your password is the confirmation number (lowercase) you received via email when you registered.

We have a choice between Domino Web Access full or lite. Very cool. The Agenda looks pretty sweet. A lot of the slide pdfs are already there.

Lots of fun stuff to play with on the LS online site this year. Seeing mostly".nsf" in the URLs. :-) Good job guys.

Get out there and fill in your profile. See you there!

Requirements Gathering and Communication

I was taking a little afternoon walk today and a funny train of thought ensued. As I was walking, it started to rain. As an Oregonian, my first thought was. Oh. Rain... Great. Hood up. It's such a part of life here this time of year. But, it suddenly struck me how odd it was that little drops of water were falling from the sky. Imagine if you lived in a world where it never rained. I don't mean a world where it used to rain and now it doesn't. I mean a world where there never was rain and you didn't even have a word for it in your vocabulary. (The rest of this little mind trip only makes sense if you pause and really grasp that concept.) How would you feel if one day it rained? It would be an entirely new experience. You'd run inside and say, "Hey everyone, there are little pieces of ocean falling from the sky!" or something crazy like that. In our world this would be something like hamburgers falling from the sky. (For those intrigued by that, here is some assigned reading)

It struck me that this is somewhat like our daily lives as IT professionals and consultants. We are always confronting people with ideas they hadn't thought of before. I was comparing this idea to requirements gathering meetings that I frequently lead and often wish I could do better. What if a business person from my crazy world came to you and said, "Hey, we need your help.
The ground is entirely too dry here." What good would it do to sit down with this business person and say, "Right, what you need is a little rain. Would you like an estimate to implement that?" The business person would be thinking, "What is wrayne and how will that make the ground stop being dry?" So many times there is this gap between technology people and business people that makes it hard to communicate. We truly do come from different worlds with different environments and vocabularies. As technology people, we need to be able to fully understand rain's capabilities but also be able to avoid unreasonable lingo and explain to the customer that we have a solution that will actually cause small droplets of water to fall from the sky which will evenly moisten the ground.

I understand this topic is older than dirt but I find that I need to remind myself of it on an approximately annual basis. It's so easy to get wrapped up with my little development environment and all my dev servers and forget how to communicate. I tend not to be detailed enough in my communication and fear that I'm boring people with details. My new year's resolution is to push myself to be a better bridge between business and technology but also stay hands-on in the design and coding I love so much.

Register now for Lotusphere 2008 Hands-On Sessions

Scratch that. Make that "Register yesterday for Lotusphere 2008 Hands-On Sessions." I saw the email pointing the Hands-On Session Registration last night as I was getting in bed. So, I tried to access the page using Opera Mini on my Blackberry but it didn't work too well. This morning, I went to the page first thing and, guess what, every session (except for a couple portal sessions) says "Session enrollment closed." Wow, that was fast!

It's hard to say if pre-registration for these sessions was a good idea. I'm sure many people just snagged the spots in case they want to attend. Anyway, more than anything, I'm just impressed that it filled up so fast. It feels like this is going to be an exciting Lotusphere!

See you in 10 days!

Moving to Blogger

Currently, my life is completely consumed with developing applications on the Lotus Notes/Domino platform. I've been doing that for 13 years. Over the past couple years I got really into blogging and had a lot of fun but then things got crazy busy at work and I just fell out of the groove. With Lotusphere coming, I can't help but start feeling more creative.

Anyway, due to port issues on my FIOS line and hardware issues with my little Domino server, I'm moving my site to Blogger. Hopefully the Domino folks out there will still talk to me. :-)

I'm going to migrate over some of the more interesting old posts and try to start posting again. I'll still post on Notes/Domino topics but I'd like to broaden into some new areas. For example, I am very interested in mobile application development and am trying to ramp up on Android. I have some big ideas!

More to come soon!