Writing and speaking update
This post has a few purposes - it's partly a bit of advertising, but it's also meant to serve as a quick way of replying to speaking requests for a while" if you've been directed here by an email from me, I hope you'll excuse the "form letter" approach. (You can probably skip down to the bottom.)
Upcoming speaking engagementsI've got a few speaking engagements in the next four months:
- December 2nd, hack.summit(): Humanity: Epic Fail (not currently sure how Tony the Pony will handle working with a webcam, but we'll see)
- December 3rd, NDC London: Abusing C#
- January 6th-9th: CodeMash: workshop on LINQ, and a session on testing with Roslyn
- February 27th: NorDevCon: Keynote (!) on passion, and C# 6 (probably with a bit of Roslyn too)
A long time ago I wrote about my hope to write two books: C# in Style and C# from Scratch. As you may have noticed, these haven't happened yet, although I have had a couple of abortive attempts.
I've been working with my publisher (Manning) to think about the best way of introducing C# to newcomers, and we've made solid progress on a book with the working title of "Grokking C#" (subtitle: getting stuff done with objects). The aim will be to introduce both C# and OO hand-in-hand" not just "enough OO to understand the syntax of C#" but hopefully enough of the big picture to encourage readers to think about objects in a way which will last them long beyond the short time they're reading the book.
The "Grokking" series from Manning is a pretty new one, but I'm really excited about the approach - it's very visual, with a lot of thought put into reducing cognitive load. Have a look at Grokking Functional Programming for an idea of the style. If this sounds a bit like the Head-First books, there's a good reason for that - Bert Bates who wrote Head-First Java with Kathy Sierra is acting in a consulting role for the Grokking books. However, the Grokking books have a style of their own - one which happens to take the things I like about the Head-First books, but without some of the aspects I'm less fond of.
I'm very much looking forward to learning a lot from Bert about getting a message out as clearly as possible. My blog, book and conference audience has always been reasonably advanced, and while I obviously answer Stack Overflow questions asked by newcomers, I haven't done a large amount of writing for that audience. I expect this to be very challenging, but really rewarding.
No more speaking engagements"Now for the bit which is tricky to tell conference organizers: I'm not going to accept any extra speaking engagements until the book is done, at least in first draft.
Writing the book is going to take a lot of my time, some of which would otherwise be family time" and currently speaking is taking about half of my vacation allocation each year. If I tried to continue with the speaking and the book, my family would suffer - and they don't deserve that.
Don't get me wrong - I still love speaking, and I'll look forward to returning to the conference scene when I'm done, assuming anyone still wants me. Hopefully by then I'll have some fresh ideas for talks as well. (I've been considering "Techniques for persuading people you're an expert when you're not" as a soft-skills talk, although I'm not sure I want to give away the secret")
Apologies to conference organizers who I've already put off a few times with "ask me next year" - people trust me when I say it isn't personal. If I had more time (or didn't have a family!) I'd love to spend my life travelling around the world giving talks and chatting with developers. There just aren't enough hours in the day :(
