My Personal Blog is now online

William — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 01:41:00 GMT

I've been idle on this blog for quite a while. I've been up to quite a bit and am planning on getting started again. Shortly after I got married, I was lucky enough to get a job working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM here in Greenville. After surviving the worst 4 months I've had in my life, I was lucky enough to start working back in Greenville at a really awesome company. Although much of my job entails programming Dynamics CRM (which is so powerful and so cool I wish I'd have learned it a long time ago), I am also doing a lot of Sharepoint and Workflow Foundation work too. I've also lucked out and been able to work on a good bit of Windows Mobile coding too. I've got a boat load of articles and posts I need to finish editing and post and I'll have them up shortly.

When I started working with CRM, I realized that it had been right under my nose all these years and I knew relatively little about it. More than just an application, Dynamics CRM is a platform and a very powerful one at that. Sharepoint too is a very viable development platform but it's next to impossible to not have worked with Sharepoint over the past few years, CRM is a little different. It really got me thinking about breadth of my skillset.

For years, I've focused, almost exclusively, on learning the newest stuff coming out of Microsoft. To some extent, I think it's largely a function of my personality. I get bored easily and always want to learn something new. But from a value perspective, it can be disappointing. Being an early adopter means API's are going to change so you'll frequently learn the same thing a few different times as it changes. Many technologies don't get the adoption you expect (WCF, WF, Cardspace anyone?) Many times customers don't want to trust their fate to something that will have just been released for a short time before it goes live. And this doesn't even take into account the hassles related to constantly installing and updating new bits.

While I still think being an early adopter is cool, I've decided to step out a little and specifically learn things that are popular but not in areas I typically deal with. The last non-Microsoft technology I put a lot of effort into was Ruby on Rails and I really liked it (Not enough to give up ASP.NET but I still like it a lot). So I decided to always keep on alternate technology on the plate at any given time. There's a lot of Microsoft Products that fit this bill as well as many non-MS products. Right now, I've been working on refining my game with .php and mySql. This came about b/c I wanted to learn Wordpress, something I've had many friends and a few family members ask for help with. So basically, I'm going to make sure I look into things I normally wouldn't have based on a good bit of adoption. Wordpress clearly fit that bill. CRM fit that bill (although being employed working with CRM helped quite a bit). I want to dig into Live a lot more and some of the other Dynamics offerings.

At the same time, I know I often include off-topic material here on my blog and I'd like to keep it purely technical. As such, I stuck a blog up at My Personal Site to host my non-technical stuff and anything not MS related. I'm going to focus on personal interests like preparing for a marathon, Amazon Kindle, Phil Hendrie Show stuff, Hacking my Ride, Home Automation, Dogs and whatever else personal in nature which doens't fit here. I've got a ton of stuff to post here, mainly on CRM and Workflow Foundation and I've already posting over there, this time I plan on posting pretty regularly.

/bill's House O Insomnia : William Ryan

My Personal Blog is now online