Readify QLD seek exceptional .NET developers and consultants

Are you an exceptional developer?

Have you already downloaded .NET 4.0?

Are you committed to growing the .NET community?

Do you want to work for one of the most innovative Microsoft development companies in Australia?

If you are a senior .NET developer, consultants or architect and are looking for a change then please contact me at faith.rees@readify.net

Check out Readify at www.readify.net

11 June CIO Pathways Workshop

Build your career path to CIO – Thur 11 June 2009
Infotech CIO Pathways Program –  Enrolments close Friday 22 May 2009

WiT invite you and your colleagues to be a part of this unique program. WiT’s one day CIO Pathways Program is a unique professional development workshop designed to provide senior IT staff with a strategy for career progression and prepare them for the challenges they will face along the track and ultimately as future CIOs and business leaders.

The CIO Pathways workshop provides you with industry experts with real world advice to help you build your CIO career path in either your current organisation or for taking the next step. Whether you aim to be a CIO for a small  to medium enterprise or a large commercial or government organisation this workshop will outline the best ways to plan your career progression.

Karen Bard
Chief Knowledge and Technology Officer, ReservoirTeam Pty Ltd., Chair and founding member of the CIO Council  of Australia and former CIO of Santos
Karen Bard our keynote speaker will explore the role of the CIO today and you will hear how Karen got to where she is today.

Leanne Ward
General Manager for Global Outsourcing and Infrastructure Services (GOIS), UNISYS Australia Pty Ltd
From her experience as a senior executive in the IT industry who has worked with many of Australia’s leading female CIOs, Leanne will share her views on the technical, managerial and personal skill sets female IT managers should develop and hone on their path to a CIO role. Leanne, who is the chairperson of the UNISYS Diversity & Inclusion Council, will also discuss the importance of diversity in the workplace and IT industry and ways it can be fostered by individuals and organisations.

Professor Simon Kaplan
Executive Dean, Faculty of Information Technology, Queensland University of Technology
Professor Simon Kaplan will discuss education options to get you from senior manager to CIO and discuss the CIO skills of the future.

Peter Grant
Former Microsoft State Director QLD and Former QLD Whole Government CIO
Peter will provide learnings from the field and share his experience working as a CIO in QLD government.  He will give tips on how people should career build and insights on his career transitions.

Con Colovos  
Former: – President CIO Executive Council, CIO IDG Australia, CIO Moraitis Group
Con Colovos looks at the entrepreneurial CIO and how to get noticed in your current company.

Anna Hodges
Consultant, Robert Walters
Anna Hodges will explore the current CIO and senior level ICT position trends, salaries and work conditions

 Benefits:

• Interactive presentation workshop with experts with real world advice
• Opportunity to have your resume critiqued and be profiled electronically post workshop
• Identify career development and job search services
• Learn about the opportunities and programs available within Government
• Career transition strategies
• Education and professional development pathways will be identified including vocational, University, private colleges, coaching and mentoring
• CIO and senior level ICT position trends, salaries and work conditions
• Identify ways of being an improved leader with valuable CIO qualities
• Actionable, immediately useful ideas to help women and men working in the IT sector to develop a personal and professional strategy to guide your future towards a stable and positive career track
• Opportunity to network and build relationships

Find out more information  here

Date: Thursday 11 June 2009 (Registrations Close on Friday 22 May 2009)
Time: 10.00am – 5.30pm (catering provided)
Venue: Microsoft, Theatre 1, Level 9 Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle St, Brisbane
Price: $150 members | $250 non-members | Student members $70 | Groups of 10 $1350

Bizspark- a fantastic new program for start-up software vendors

Microsoft Bizspark- Turning today’s most promising Start Ups intotomorrow’s most successful businesses.

Bizspark is an innovative new program that unites Start Ups with entrepeneurial and technology resources in a global community with a common goal of supporting and accelerating the success of a new gernation of high potential Start Ups http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

To be eligible for BizSpark, all of the following must be true. Your Startup:

• Is in the business of software development,
• Is privately held,
• Has been in business for less than 3 years and
• Has less than US $1 million in annual revenue

To be eligible to use the software for production and deployment of hosted solutions Startups must also be developing a new “software as a service” solution (on any platform) to be delivered over the Internet.

A New Venture

There are many reasons I have not posted for some time- my lapse started with a trip to Dubai and then a few weeks in Greece. Blog apathy continued as upon my return I headed to Sydney for Tech Ed and Readify’s Kick Off. I then had about 5 weeks of email and activities to catch up on. Ok that takes me up to about mid Sept. So over the past few months I have been handing over my QLD State Management responsibilities at Readify to Peter Fitzsimon. I am now focused on Readify’s product management role continuing to grow our training business and come up with a few innovative consulting offerings. I have also been renovating the house and starting my own business- am I forgiven?

Moving into 2009 I will continue with Readify as their National Product Manager and my new baby MVP Intel will be born. The website is currently under construction but should be up in late Jan 09 www.mvpintel.com.au – more on this as the company progresses.

So there’s the quick update.

I’ll make a new year’s resolution to blog more in 09. Merry Christmas in case I don’t blog before then- stay safe and happy.

Long time no post

Ok I warned you all at the start my posting would be random. I know I have not posted for quite some time. I hereby pledge to try and blog more:-)

RDN Dev Days launch this month- 1 day, 3 of Readify’s Best

BOOK NOW  http://www.readify.net/rdn+dev+days.aspx

Check out the Agenda and Register before it’s two late! Registration is only open for 2 weeks, 3 of Readify’s best- hands on labs, Q&A sessions, demos and more- 1 day in your state $315+GST per person.

TFS, WPF, WCF, Agile Development, LINQ, Silverlight all in 1 day.

Brisbane 25th July, Perth 29th July, Sydney 15th Aug and Melbourne Aug

agenda2

Resources for you- stay tuned

Given my last post and my commitment to blog more regularly, I will be adding two pages with resources for the stuff I get asked all the time.

1. Independent Software Vendors (ISV) - this will answer a bunch of questions I get asked all the time from existing Microsoft partners and those that are wanting to become Microsoft ISV partners. And if you are a business owner in this space then you should become a member of the .NET Cluster in your state.

2. Training, training and more training- resource links, Microsoft Certification questions and answers etc.

Stay tuned for the resource pages and feel free to either make a comment with any questions or send me an email faith.rees@readify.net

Blogging Bliss?

Yeah right!! Now you see this is why I hadn’t started a blog- because I struggle to keep it up to date:-) There is all this stuff that goes around in my head and I think- hey I should blog that, but I just never get around to it. I applaud those of you out there who manage to maintain your blogs and blog regularly My mate Parso had somewhat of a similar dilemma himself a while back.  mrandypuppy said it was because he just needed to “go dark” despite being born into the modern world of multitasking and loving all things tech “like mobile phones, online messaging clients, email and Facebook (thanks for all those friends Parso on my recent Face Book listing). I Twitter, blog, run a website, run multiple messaging clients, have umpteen million email accounts.” Ultimately Parso was saying that at some point something has to give, at times struggling to maintain his various forms of connection to the world while actually living life.

And here in lies my challenge- keeping all my various forms of online comms up to date along with work sites (internal and external), living my life (there is no way I could keep up with a second life) oh yeah and there is my day job and I’m working away to set up my own business- another website!!! And no I don’t twitter!

So after a month of obsessing over the fact that I had posted nothing for a month and my blog was only 2 months old, it was somewhat timely that on a flight to Melbourne a couple of weeks ago I happened to be reading a Swinburne uni mag, that low and behold had a story on the front cover stating “Blogging is good for you”.

Well, I was intrigued “good for you”- really- the headline read “Blogging Bliss in online Oratory- A Masters project that found blogging to be quite therapeutic has triggered a global upswell of feel-good feedback” by Karin Derkley. The story discusses the online spread of an article by James Baker, a Masters student in the Faculty of Life and Social Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology and his research into the psychological effects of blogging- you can read the full article here. The overriding response is that blogging gives people the chance to connect with others like themselves- after two months subjects that had kept a blog rated themselves as less depressed and more socially connected than those who did not. The interesting thing was that bloggers said not only did they feel more socially connected online, they were also more satisfied with their offline friends and relationships as well. It seems the connections they made online had a clear spin-off to the satisfaction they had in their outside life”.

Well, clearly I wasn’t a subject, keeping a blog has had the opposite effect on moi. To me blogging, rather than being a social connector making me happier, is another thing to manage, maintain and update and causes me considerable stress when I realise that I haven’t done any of those things. I guess ultimately it depends why you blog- is it as an online diary, is it your quest for your 15 minutes of fame that could stem to eternity, is it as a platform for closet exhibitionists, is it for work, is it to share your knowledge?

So I hereby pledge to try harder to keep this site up to date- I’ve updated the Calendar of events and I have finally added the photos of Scruffy my once beloved monkey. Check back next month and see how I’m doingJ

Scruffy the Monkey

Cool Bamboo tech- not the wacom

I am editing this month’s version of “Women in Technology’s” newsletter and as part of my search for cool tech links, I came across some eco friendly products made from bamboo.

Dell’s CEO speech at the Fortune Green conference showed off a “never before seen” eco-inspired computer with a bamboo casing. 81 percent smaller than a standard desktop, uses 70 percent less power and is filled with recycled materials like old bottles, milk jugs and detergent cases.  Check out the article and pictures c/ of Earth2tech at http://earth2tech.com/2008/04/22/pictures-of-dells-eco-bamboo-computer/

Desktop’s not your thing? How about an ASUS bamboo lap top? http://crave.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,39029450,49288082,00.htm

Or if you just want some eco friendly accessories- you can get yourself a bamboo mouse, monitor and keyboard. Check out http://www.nigelsecostore.com/

Of course while Bamboo products are arguably more environmentally friendly than the current plastics used in casings of technical hardware, there will be advocates out there who claim that the new uses for bamboo (Bamboo is actually a grass, it grows fast and harvesting it doesn’t create the problems that cutting down trees does- albeit traditionally) will come to threaten the environment equally. While the debate is brewing about bamboo as a substitute for paper, it stands to reason the same principles will come into play as we find more creative uses for bamboo such as the above and the current designer trend of using bamboo for flooring- for more info on the debate around bamboo and the extent to which land is being cleared to make way for bamboo plantations go to http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/7-10-2006-101758.asp. It seems in our world today we can never get enough of good thing!!! That said the products are cool and at least at this time point in history have to better than plastic alternatives??